This Is Where My Stuff Lives

The personal and professional (citation needed) page of Quinn (me)

Update 11/06/24 - I'm Not Giving Up And You Shouldn't Either

In 2016, when Trump got elected the first time, Leonard Cohen had also recently died. That week's Saturday Night Live opened with Kate McKinnon as Hillary Clinton at the piano, playing and singing "Hallelujah", and ending with her looking straight at the camera saying "I'm not giving up, and you shouldn't either." It was deeply weird, but in fairness it was a deeply weird time. But that last line, "I'm not giving up and you shouldn't either", affected me more than it probably should have. It's been playing in my head since last night.

This is my house.

That flag has been in that window for nearly a decade, and it's not coming down now. We will protect ourselves but we will not hide what and who we are just because a vocal minority is having a toddler tantrum about it. Nevertheless, we persist. I'm not saying it's gonna be good. I'm not saying it's gonna be easy. I'm saying it's what we have to do, because the alternative is unacceptable.

I'm not giving up, and you shouldn't either.

Update 11/04/24 - Buttons!

I made a handful of linkback buttons, available over here at the Find Me page. Or right here also, I guess.



Literally the only thing I've laid a hand to today that didn't make my brain make the yuckberry face. It's tempting to blame the fact that I missed my meds today, but I've been like that for a few days. Possibly election stress, possibly the fact that my meds are inadequate anyways, but since I'm reliant on a free clinic & they don't do stimulant meds so it's this or nothing. Vote blue so I can get a real healthcare system and have actual treatment options.

Speaking of healthcare, I have belatedly learned that it's Diabetes Awareness Month, so maybe if I don't implode tomorrow night I'll make a post about type 1 diabetes. The sheer lack of information out there is wild.

(PS I started playing the Astarion origin in BG3 to ease the DATV jonesing and the fact that Astarion's comforting "drift off to sleep meditation" thought is dragging Cazador out into the sun is both very telling and extremely valid.)

Update 11/01/24 - I'm Gonna Make It Through This Year If It Kills You

First of all: rabbit rabbit.

Having said that: FFK index is done, including fixing the 3rd which was somehow a mirror of the 11th. I still don't know how I did that.

Now it is November, and because NaNoWriMo can go fuck itself, it's Totally Generic Wordcount Challenge. I'm aiming for the (much more reasonable imo) 500 words/day, which I need to hustle on if I don't wanna start the month already behind. The project is still kind of loosey-goosey but it's for sure got WLW and magic cowboys, so. There are worse starting points. I'll post updates every so often on Bluesky (note to me put Bluesky on the socials page).

Speaking of not allowing myself to exist in a space controled by a dipshit would-be dictator: I voted! I hope you vote too, and I hope you don't make Perfect the enemy of Not Dying In A Wasteland Controlled By People Who Hate That You Exist On The Planet. Or something.

I've got some real bullshittery going on with my health, specifically the tooth part of my face, and have absolutely no way to get it addressed because the bones sticking out of my face are somehow less important/more expensive than the ones inside of my skin. It's not great and takes up about 30% of my brain processing at any given time, which is probably why I keep having dreams about all my teeth falling out. (I know those are common anyway, the point is I keep having them and I would prefer not to.)

But I also have a hand-me-down Cirkul bottle, which is doing wonders for making me drink more water. So it balances out probably (it doesn't).

I am too tired and too strung-out to be allowed on the internet right now, so I'm gonna call this a post and come back with a real productivity update when I'm more coherent.

Update 10/29/24 - Hurt People Hurt People

Today's FFK entry has been percolating in my head since my Gale-romancing Durge came to him with the possibility of doing the do with Halsin and he responded by calling her everything but a child of God before flouncing off to deal with ~*~his condition~*~.

If it wasn't obvious, I didn't care for that particular dialouge tree.

I knew this conversation was going to make me cringe, because all the clips I'd seen had made me cringe. But I save scummed through every iteration, hoping there was anything that didn't make me awful. There wasn't. And I wish I'd recorded it, because I swear there was more than "sorry for bringing it up" and "well fuck you then" but I can't find a single video that includes them. And it was all bad!

He's allowed to be monogamous. Everyone is allowed to be monogamous if that's the relationship model that makes them comfortable and happy. But imagine coming to your partner and suggesting something you want to do with them or an element you want to include in your relationship and getting hit with "that's disgusting. why would you suggest that? how could you do that to me?" Feels shitty, right? (Him bringing up the orb was more manipulative than threatening, but I didn't want to accidentally veer into therapyspeak.)

My reading of Gale's situation is that Mystra was possessive, or at the very least demanded the upper hand in their relationship (such as it was). Gale has absorbed that and is projecting it onto a romanced Tav. He didn't deserve what happened to him and Tav doesn't deserve to be talked to like that.

And ykw, neither did I. I'm polyamorous. My longest, most stable relationship is within a polycule. I've had it belittled, diminished, my partner accused of manipulating or abusing me, and it was all reflected in Gale's reaction to Halsin's proposition, and then again from other people when I try to have a conversation about it. There's no option to call Gale out because it's a video game and they can only include so much, and you can't call these people out for being jerks to a stranger on the internet because they truly and earnestly believe they're better than me because they subscribe to a different relationship model.

So was this ventfic? Maybe a little. Getting it out on the page doesn't make me feel any better about it, though, because I know relationships like mine will continue to either be demonized or mocked until people grow past their pearl-clutching.

(And ykw? I don't even like Halsin. I don't go for the polyam with him in any of my other romances. But none of them make me feel like ass just for bringing it up, either.)

Update 10/25/24 - Oops

So it turns out time moves really fast when you have a kid and chronic illness and bills to pay.

I sat down to write up the thing about Sam's leukemia and I just couldn't do it. It's basically all I've talked about for the past year (almost exactly a year, actually) and I'm just. So tired of talking about it. Maybe I will someday, when the fatigue wears off, but I just can't for right now. So...sorry for not following through on that.

You may have noticed that I have been active on here, however; I'm doing Fic/Fluff/Kinktober again, and it is once again both really fun and really stressful. I stared at yesterday's entry for thirty minutes trying to come up with a title and summary bc my brain was just totally fried. I was way ahead for a while because I was at my parents' place and couldn't post, but that buffer is Gone and I'm only about a day ahead at any given time. Almost done, though, and then I move on to not!NaNoWriMo bc fuck NaNoWriMo.

I played the Metaphor Re:Fantazio demo and goddammit Atlus I don't have money for a new game right now. I'm already grinding out points on Apps That Pay For Games to try to at least get a discount on Veilguard, because I'm really excited for Veilguard. Refantazio's on my Christmas list for sure, though. I am not immune to The Persona Formula. Dead Island 2 just dropped NG+, as well, and I've been enjoying getting my ass kicked after so long of just being able to mow down the little guys and maybe struggling with some of the apex variants. (That one they added in SoLA, with the gut-ropes, she can die in a hole.) (SoLA in general was kind of disappointing, as a DLC? I loved Haus to death, especially some of the post-plot side quests, but SoLA just has a bunch of collectibles to grind out and the map is actively malevolent towards me trying to find anything. Also the final boss is such a slog to get through, jesus christ. Unfortunately Jacob is still my blorbo and therefore I will continue playing until they pry it out of my cold dead fingers.)

I've been trying to keep up with some of the shows my mom got me into, namely Brilliant Minds and The Old Man. But while Hulu has TOM next-day, they want me to give them $95/mo for the Live TV whatever and I'm sorry Zachary Quinto but you are simply not worth $95/mo. I'll sail the high seas like every other self-respecting consumer of media. I actually started TOM over, simply because when I watch it with my parents it's hella dark and they don't use subtitles so I only catch about a third of what's going on. So that's been my background noise when I do art.

(Reminder to me, I gotta post a bunch of art.)

Also just yesterday finished The Legend of Vox Machina s3 and while I deeply loved it, they finally got to the point they had to make some big changes from the D&D Game Format to Serial Television Format. I didn't hate any of the changes, but the end of the season felt kind of rushed? Apparently they did change some stuff due to not knowing if there would be a season 4 and wanting to have a clean ending just in case, and I hate that for any production. I guess it's better than getting another Deadwood, where they introduce a bunch of stuff and then it doesn't go anywhere, though. There was stuff introduced in LOVM that didn't go anywhere, tbh, but I guess now they have a fourth season to deal with it.

Aside from that, and reading Warrior Cats with my kid (I was not a Warrior Cat Kid, myself, but she's super into it), life has just been lifeing. Doing Halloween stuff with Kiddo this weekend and then putting my nose back to the grindstone. Which implies it ever left, so never mind I guess.

Update 8/4/2024 - Reporting Live From The Deep End

Hi. I haven't abandoned y'all, honest. Everything is just so much all the time. I'm gonna write a long-form post about everything that's happened since Sam came home - she's doing great, btw. She's in maintenance phase, which means the cancer is undetectable and they're working to keep it that way. The meds she's on still knock her out (methotrexate, if you're familiar), but she's present most of the time.

Anyway. That long form post will be its own whole thing over in the Writing section probably. It'll mostly be financial woes tbh, once they figured out Sam was allergic to that one kind of chemo her actual treatment was mostly smooth sailing. Her insurance and our...everything, not so much. Also featured: bitching about the United States Postal Service and gushing over our community and the concept of mutual aid.

Now, since I intend for this to be a real blog post: recommendations!



So upcoming: long What You Missed On Glee post. I have so much art to post. A handful of writing. I just have to sit down and make myself upload and format it all. Sorry for the long silence, hopefully the silences will be shorter going forward.

Update 2/12/2024 - Drive-By Update

Just a quick update to say I put a whole bunch of pixel art up in the gallery. Only one is for sale, but I'm proud of all of it. Give it a look!

Update 2/11/2024 - I Still Exist

I'm still here I swear.

Sam update: Sam's been home for around a month now, and it's been. A month. Found out she's allergic to a certain kind of chemo (thankfully another one works) and that one of the meds she has to take to give her an immune system back makes her legs feel like they're snapping in half (not an exaggeration) so, y'know. Fuck cancer. Otherwise she's doing well and responding well to her treatments when she's not allergic to them. She wound up not needing rehab once she got home; she's still not as strong as she used to be but she can get around well enough on her own, and is getting better every day. Just her coming up the stairs (we live in a split-level) is miles better now vs when she first came home. Or her being able to bend over and pick stuff up, or get off of our ancient sunken-in sofa without struggle. Just little things every day, it's great to see.

Unfortunately, we do still live in America.



Do you see how many digits that has? That's so many digits. And insurance has zeroed it out, which is amazing and we're extremely grateful, but...that was accrued over the past three months. And Sam's deductible rolls over in May. Meaning we'll be on the hook for any costs after that. That's at least three more months of regular chemo appointments and several years of maintenance after that. It's a wide road, and we're gonna need help getting to the other side of it. And on top of THAT, we need $3000 by May in order to keep our house. It's not great, Bob.

If you want to help we would appreciate it so, so much; there's a linktree with a bunch of links including a GoFundMe.

TO THAT END I've finally done the thing I've been swearing to do since I started this thing: art pages! There's that link and then also up there in the link bar thing. There's just a couple of things up right now but as I make more stuff I'll update those pages. There are shop links for what's there now, but not everything will be for sale.

Now, Per My Last Blog Post: my opinion on Pokemon Concierge is that it's fucking cute and I want nine seasons.

Other things I've been watching are Apothecary Diaries (aroace queen who only gets horny for weird poisons) (I know there's romance eventually, let me have this for now), Solo Leveling (I'm very behind on this but I enjoy what I have watched), Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (I was 5 when it first aired, I'm allowed to be late) and Mushi-shi, at my partner's recommendation. In non-visual media I've been finally listening to the rest of TAZ: Ethersea (honestly the fandom drove me off of TAZ as a whole for a while) and Mom Can't Cook: A DCOM Podcast. Mom Can't Cook is like half my personality right now; if you watch Outside XBox/Xtra, it's Luke Westaway and Andy Farrant talking about Disney Channel Original Movies in order to justify having watched every single one of them during lockdown. Please listen to Mom Can't Cook so I can say stuff like "my testicles are a flat circle" without having to explain myself. (that's a spotify link but it's also on apple podcasts) They also have a patreon version called Extra Helpings where they recap episodes of So Weird (90s paranormal MOTW show) and I also enjoy that a great deal. ngl most of my decompress time has been playing Powerwash Simulator and listening to podcasts; I'm almost done with Powerwash career mode so idk how I'm gonna listen to podcasts after that.

I feel like I've just made the end of my blog posts an unofficial rec list now. Maybe next time I'll talk about video games and how much I wish I could afford FF7 Rebirth.

Update 12/28/2023 - Forward, Ever Forward

Sam's on track to be out of the hospital in the next couple of days and into a physical rehab facility! She's got all the tubes and stuff out of her neck and just has one port to use for meds/blood draws/etc. She'll be in the rehab place for a couple of weeks getting her strength back and learning how to deal with her new normal on a daily basis. It's a big step towards her coming home and I'm excited about it. ([aggressively knocks on wood])


Behold, a Sam.


In other news, I watched the Doctor Who Christmas special and am unreasonably excited for Ncuti Gatwa's run, he's a delight. 15 is a good successor to 10/14 in terms of sheer manic energy and I'm really excited to see him eventually do Dark and Tormented Doctor (there was a little of the Tormented part but I've always loved a good Oncoming Storm scene). The special left me with Theories about the upcoming season, which is always nice. My partner has a habit of calling plot elements before they happen so it'll be fun to see if he manages it again. (I have a screenshot somewhere of a text message from him outlining what he thought the season 2 finale of Mandalorian was gonna be and every single one was correct) (I believe he did the same thing with Wandavision) (It sometimes gets to the point he's not allowed to talk to us about stuff bc he ends up spoiling whatever it is just by having theories)

I've also watched the first two episodes of the Percy Jackson series, and I'll be honest - didn't love it. The casting is perfect and the show looks gorgeous, but Percy has a bad case of the plot happening to him rather than because of him. A bit I loved in the book - Percy putting two and two together that his mom is probably being held in the Underworld and the quest will take him to the Underworld so he can kick Hades' ass and get his mom back (and being cagey about it on top of that bc he figured that Chiron wouldn't let him go if he knew), is now just. Grover telling Percy about it. The paradox is that I did like the scene that happened in, with the I Am Sally Jackson's Son speech and Percy immediately about-facing on wanting to do the quest, I just hate the loss of Conniving Little Shit Perseus Jackson. Maybe there'll be more conniving in the future, who knows. Mostly I think it suffers from the 8-episode format; the first two episodes seemed to be trying to get the camp stuff out of the way so they can do the quest stuff, but the camp stuff is important, it sets up the world and Percy's relationships with everyone (far too little has happened between him and Annabeth so far), and also where is the Oracle, I love her and I miss her. Also no hellhound/scorpion things/whatever, showing that the camp is compromised. I know all adaptations are going to change stuff, but the first two episodes felt like they were hitting The Stations of the Canon and not really caring what they lost in order to do it.

("But Rick Riordan signed off on it!" okay maybe Uncle Rick is good at writing books and not so good at making TV shows, did you think about that)(and no this is not a condemnation of the casting, the casting is perfect, the writing is wonky)

Speaking of adaptations! (I've been watching a lot of TV to cope okay) I watched both the One Piece and the first episode of the Yu Yu Hakusho live-action adaptations. I was extremely skeptical that One Piece could be done in live-action, but it captured the vibes really well. The world is still suitably silly (One Piece has made me cry more than twice but it's still inherently silly) and everyone's first reaction to meeting Luffy is "what the hell just happened", which is Correct.

By contrast, the Yu Yu Hakusho live action was. Not as good. Now, YYH is one of the cornerstones of my personality. I have been ride or die for this series for twenty goddamn years. Again, I know adaptations change things. But this show is not YYH. This is a YYH horror AU. The acting is great, the stuntwork is great, the effects are great. I actually enjoyed the first episode a decent amount. But not for the same reasons I enjoy YYH, which I feel like is kind of a base requirement for an adaptation. OP had the correct vibes. PJO has the correct vibes, even with my issues with it. YYH has not captured the same vibes as the anime or manga, and it's entirely because they're trying to make it more serious than it is. YYH is silly. The boys are silly, they are soft-hearted doofuses trying to pretend they're not. The first episode has some of that - after all, the whole point was that no one expected Yusuke to die saving a little kid, when in fact Yusuke would never not have tried to save a little kid - but that is not translating out into the work at large. I might watch more episodes and see if that changes, I just have to be in the mood for horror stuff and I really haven't been.

Plus Botan doesn't even have an oar. I get not wanting to have to animate her flying around on it all the time, but they went to Spirit World in a freaking rowboat and they couldn't have just had her HOLD one as a reference?? Weak.

Anyway. I have Opinions about Television, but now I have to go clean my house because my parents are coming up this weekend for Belated Christmas. (I love them, I'm glad they're coming, I just don't like cleaning my house.) Then I get to watch Pokemon Concierge and have opinions about that too.

Update 12/20/2023 - Jinxed It

The doctor told Sam "everything's boring, which is good" and she took it as a challenge.

For the past week she's been in the ICU with freaking e. coli. Her PICC line, one of the tubes they stuck in her for medical reasons, got some e. coli stuck on it (you can carry e. coli on your skin, it's just that a normal functioning immune system can usually fight it off, and she doesn't have one of those right now) and sent her into sepsis. She was intubated and sedated for six days, and had a feeding tube in for three. You'll notice I'm saying all this in past tense, because she's awake and breathing on her own and out of the ICU. She's just got a case of the baby deer legs from being sedated for so long.

This apparently hasn't set her chemo back any - they kept her on most of her meds while she was sedated, she just hasn't received the injectable chemo - so we're hopefully still on track. The timetable has changed slightly since my last update, so we're looking more at January than before Christmas, but that's still a good track to be on. It's when she gets home that everything's going to get weird, with the lifestyle changes we'll have to make. But we've adapted before, we can do it again.

Thank you again to everyone who's donated to and shared the GFM, it means a lot. We'll get out of this hole eventually.

Update 12/4/2023 - I Didn't Even DO NaNo This Year

Hello, I still exist, my life has just been thrown in a meat grinder.

Over the Thanksgiving break, me and my kid went to visit my parents. Now, quick note about my kid: she is actually the biological child of my roommates, but I've known her since birth and am functionally a third parent to her. So while we were visiting my parents, her parents were in the hospital.

On Nov. 19th, the same day we left, her dad (David) rushed her mom (Sam) to the ER with severe pain and shortness of breath. After a lot of fuckery on Wellstar's part, she was transferred to Northside Hospital in Atlanta, where she was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphocytic leukemia.

I am truncating a lot, largely because I have typed out the whole story so many times in the last couple of weeks. The crux of it is that acute leukemia hits like a truck (vs chronic leukemia that builds up over time). The pain was from her spleen being so enlarged it was basically trying to escape. The amount of immature white blood cells she was producing created fluid pressing on her heart and lungs. She was on dialysis to take the strain of filtering the excess cells off of her kidneys. She's been at Northside for two weeks now and is currently receiving chemotherapy. Her family (biological family) is being tested for stem cell transplant. It is Very Real, no matter how much I keep trying to convince myself I'm hallucinating the whole thing.

Now, we have The Misfortune of Being American, so this is going to cost...just so much money. So much money. And that's just the medcial bills. We are very suddenly a single-earner household. David's job has been so kind to us and we have an outpouring of support from our village but unfortunately that doesn't buy groceries. That doesn't pay the light bill. Not to mention the gas from David going into the city every weekend or the wear and tear on our poor car (or the oil change it desperately needs). To that end we've started a GoFundMe to cover Sam's costs and also the day-to-day costs for us, and the cost of care for David and Kiddo's type 1 diabetes. I made a card about it!



We're trying to spread this around, just to get more eyes and ears on everything, so if you want to save it and post it other places that would be absolutely wonderful. I only ask you don't hotlink it because it is uploaded to Neocities itself. We also have a collection of social medias about it if you want to keep up with how things are going. And (financials aside) they're going great! She's responding really well to the treatments and looks on track to be out before Christmas (*knocks on wood*).

So if you want to donate, or share the card, or link to the GFM on your own accounts, we would all appreciate the hell out of it. This is a very big scary time, and everything we don't have to worry about is a huge gift. (My bathtub is also leaking. I'm hoping if I don't look at it too hard it won't be a problem.) Thank you in advance and we love you.

Update 11/12/2023 - And Now For Something Completely Different

The way people treat Act 1 Astarion baffles me.

He is charming, flattering, flirtatious. He is down bad for you basically immediately and has no qualms in telling you so. He practically shoves people out of the way for your time and attention. He is fucking lying to you.

If you pursue a romance with him he tells you to your face that he was manipulating you. He wanted you to be so infatuated with him that when it inevitably came to light that he is in fact a Creature Of The Night, you would not only accept it but defend him from others who might not. None of what he said to you was real. Now, in the course of the romance it turns out that he did eventually develop feelings for you and he regrets that the first few weeks (or however long it took you to beat act 1) you had together were built on a lie, but that doesn't change the fact that he was a towering fountain of bullshit for that entire time.

And you know what? It worked on me. In my first playthrough I fell head over heels for this snarky, flirty, jackass of a vampire. (I'm one of the hopeless fools who wanted to romance Deacon in Fallout 4, so clearly I have a type.) I would absolutely have been Cazador chow.

But in my second playthrough, it felt bad. I was doing a very specific set of events - my Durge is romancing Gale but I wanted to get the scene where you can tell Astarion that he needs a friend more than a lover, which involved going at least a little ways down his romance path - and it felt icky. Fia (the Durge) doesn't know these things about Astarion. Fia is also fond of the snarky flirty vampire. Fia wanted to have a fun night at the tiefling party that Gale was at the time unwilling to indulge in. (She asked.) Me, the human behind the controller who knows Astarion dissociates every time someone gets within arm's reach, felt gross buying into the act even by proxy.

Which brings me to the baffling part - people who take Act 1 Astarion at face value. People who have beaten the game, gone through his whole arc, even some who have ascended him! (Ascending Astarion is a perfectly valid gameplay choice if that's what floats your goat, but in this context it's indicative of how deeply they've gotten into his personal lore.) Who still respond to the way he acts in the beginning as though he is really and truly confessing his love to you in your third ever interaction. I get it, it can be nice to have someone talk to you that way (I did admit that it worked on me to start with) but knowing he is actively giving himself psychic damage, that it is a fight-or-flight response (I think it would actually be a form of fawn response, I don't remember if "fuck" is its own panic response) and he is doing what he thinks he has to do to survive? I don't see how you can quote "it's as though the gods made you just to ruin me" as a genuinely romantic line in context.

But that's me. People are obviously free to enjoy the game however they want, just as I am equally free to not read the comments on tiktok edits because they make me go >:| in real life. (I should not be reading tiktok comments regardless, I know better.)

Update 10/29/2023 - Prepared to Trip At The Finish Line

I am notoriously terrible at finishing writing challenges or prompt lists - I've only finished NaNoWriMo once (though I am cursed so maybe that doesn't count) - so the fact that I'm so close to actually finishing Fic/Fluff/Kinktober is very exciting to me. I write ahead so I've actually only got one more to write, but that's where they get me. That's where I always fuck up.

"Quinn what the fuck do you mean you're cursed" every time, EVERY TIME I try to do National Novel Writing Month, something happens. My partner's in a car wreck, or goes to the hospital, or someone dies, just something that throws me off track and I never manage to catch up. I am going to attempt an unofficial run at it this year, working on Never Limited and Never Complete, my Psychonauts fic that's been eating my brain for two years. I'll probably post snippets on tumblr more often than I will here, just for format reasons. (I'm also still strongly resisting an Oregon Trail AU.) (Ooh, or an ORGAN Trail AU, that would also be fun.)

I have to go sift through prompts until one bites me, so I will leave you with the tumblr post that inspired today's fic.

Update 10/19/2023 - Fell Off The Wagon

Title is not in fact a reference to the OTAU (oregon trail au) I talked about in my last entry, though that would have been very funny. No, I finally missed a day of writing, which I haven't really done this month so far. In my defense, I got sick. Kiddo is pretty much the only one at school still masking, so she brings home all the lovely germs her classmates gift to her just from proximity/Contact With Surfaces. So she had a day of Bad Cough and Sniffles, and then so did I. Problem is, my cough-and-sniffles manifests as massive-repeated-sneezes-and-sniffles, which makes it really hard to write. My back and side muscles are still protesting today, but I managed to sit up long enough to post stuff, anyway. We'll see if I can write as well, or if The Sneezening will continue. I'm gonna have to chug a Liquid IV here in a minute to fix my electrolytes, and let me tell you, reader: not my favorite activity.

This is the third entry in a row I've talked about medical shit at length; I really am old.

On a different yet related topic, I played a lot of Baldur's Gate yesterday. I would say I made a lot of progress, except most of it was save-scumming the fight at the end of Shadowheart's quest until I gave up and sniped the boss from the stairs before the cutscene triggered. Not exactly heroic, but it worked. (Then it was save-scumming ANOTHER fight, and then an inconsequential 25 DC roll that is a personal vendetta now.) I'm basically wrapping up all the quests I can before I head into endgame, but also I keep stumbling onto new quests. I know it's meant to be replayed and I know there's stuff I'm gonna miss (or deliberately avoid; Lae'zel is not going to be pleased with me re: the Orphic Hammer) but it really bugs me to have an unfinished quest sitting in my journal. Act 3 also still needs some polish, I think, probably just due to the sheer amount of Stuff Going On. I'm playing on PS5, which might also be part of it, and the only "game breaker" I've encountered so far was the broken drider lantern in act 2 that was technically fixable, just tedious. (I also obsessively look up every possible game-affecting choice, which is all of them, so I might be skirting large numbers of them by being overly cautious orz)

I just have brainrot over this game so hard; it's why so many of my FFK things have been BG3 fics. It's like BG3 in general, Astarion specifically, with a side of Gale. I'm already trying to build my next character and waffling over whether I want a Regular Tav Gale Romance or a Durge Astarion Romance OR an Astarion Origin Karlach Romance (I have heard it is a v good romance). (Neil Newbon has not helped in the slightest with my Astarion brainrot; he ALSO has Astarion brainrot and it's delightful to watch.)

I'm truly just stalling on writing at this point. I need to eat food so my body remembers how to body so I can get something out before I go pick up my kid. I can manage a small something, right? I believe in me. I have determination. I don't need back muscles.

Update 10/12/23 - Joint Pain Part 2: Ibuprofen Boogaloo

I now have fics up with all three (four? does Pigeon count?) of my Fallout 4 OCs. I love them all dearly and I'm so glad I finally got to actually write something with them. (I didn't even intend for Cherry and Mac to be a thing, I just had them in the same scene in one of Ruby's things and they kept staring at each other.) (Honestly Pidge was a last-minute development too; I had a mental image of Billy gunning somebody down and needed a reason for her to do that.) (Even then Pidge is a reskin of an old friend's child OC that I've been trying desperately to work into more stuff bc I love her dearly and want her to live forever.)

I talked about my partner's medical shit last time so ig I might as well talk about mine, since it's making themselves especially known today. I have patellar subluxation syndrome, which is where my kneecap doesn't sit correctly in the socket. Best guess is it happened when I was a kid; I dislocated my knee during karate, but since I popped back up and kept walking around on it, mom never took me to the doctor or anything. It dislocates really easily now, and also has periods of just plain hurting, like during wet or cold weather. Lucky me, we're currently having both. It doesn't usually hurt quite like this though, so I don't know if I have a cartillage pinch somewhere or (and this might sound stupid) if it's because I've been cutting caffeine. I know caffeine can affect pain levels, I don't know if that'd be enough to do this though. I didn't even cut it on purpose, I've just really been craving root beer lately.

Talking about Pidge's origins in my parenthetical up there is making me think of one of my favorite things I've ever done and I'm all nostalgic now - the only RP I've ever really been involved in was a loosey-goosey off-the-cuff thing my friends and I came up with in the skype chat (yes, hi, I'm old) and at one point I put all of them in a series of Oregon Trail games and wrote fics based on the events thereof. My favorite coincidental event was when my friend's OC died of a snakebite and her boyfriend walked off into the prairie for three days. Love it when the dice get involved in the narrative. (This is also what sparked my love of Weird West fiction but all anybody wants to write is horror.) (I don't want zombies and appropriated indigenous culture, I want wizards in cowboy hats and frontier towns populated entirely by robots.)

Anyway. I need to get off this soapbox efore I abandon all my more reasonable plans to write a new version of Oregon Trail AU. What I need to be doing is trying to write more FFK before I inevitably end up trying to nap this pain off until I have to go retrieve my child. (PS I also really love the YYH thing I posted yesterday; I have a whole Thing where Keiko and Kuwabara fall for each other while Yusuke's gone and I'm going to get it out there if it kills me.)

Update 10/7/23 - Keep It Rolling

Fic/Fluff/Kinktober continues over here and also over here on AO3, in defiance of the way my wrists are throbbing in announcement of fall in the Southeast. All my joints, really, which I'm attributing to a stress response from my partner being in the hospital.

Brief rundown of my partner's medical bullfuckery, bc it will likely come up again: he's low-iron anemic, so every so often he ends up in the hospital for a couple of days to get topped up on blood bc regular iron infusions are for people with insurance. (The lack of insurance is not his fault; his various employers keep being So Understanding about his medical issues right up until he actually has to address his medical issues.) Regular hemoglobin for a healthy person is between 14 and 17. He averages about an 8 on a good day. Usually when he has to go in he's at a 5. This time he was at a 3. A t h r e e. And yet almost none of his normal symptoms presented. He was just chilling with mild fatigue at a fucking three-point-five. The human body is weird and stupid and his specifically exists to cause me stress. And joint pain.

("Nochi joint pain brought on by stress is indicative of an autoimmune issue and you should speak to a healthcare professional" I would love to. Head here to help me do just that.) (In all seriousness donations would really help, paypal is on some bullshit and while redbubble sales are helpful I only get paid from there once a month. ko-fi is immediate and I get the whole tip instead of getting it nickeled and dimed away from me.)

And now I have to go write like the arthritic wind, because I fell behind while my partner was in the hospital and if I'm not at least two days ahead I will not finish the challenge. NaNoWriMo has taught me this.

Update: 10/3/23 - Taught Myself A Thing

October 3rd is now up, and it's actual porn, which means I can now never link my mother to my website. (Me whining that I'm bored of writing smut and then ONE hate sex prompt comes along...)

In the process I also taught myself how to make collapsible buttons, by which I obviously mean copy the code from somewhere else and tweak it to my purposes, but the point is there's a collapsible button for the smut tags so they don't make the entry on the index huge. Next stop is frames. [laugh track goes here]

Update: 10/2/23 - It's Too Early For A Title

(Why did I start doing titles anyway, I knew it was just going to bring me pain.)

Oct. 2nd is up because if I do it now I won't feel guilty about not doing it while I'm doing boring real-life stuff the rest of the day. I will in fact still feel guilty for not writing, that's just a fact of my existence.

Update: 10/1/23 - Archive Access Denied

The first day of Fic/Fluff/Kinktober is up, available at this link here or by clicking through the "Writing" link up there in the navigation. I was gonna add them to an unrevealed AO3 collection as I went and then reveal it at the end of the month, but I couldn't get the collection to behave so I might just post it the next day. Irritated by this turn of events but sometimes the internet be like that.

Related to nothing, but I finally looked at the combat log in Baldur's Gate 3 during actual combat and it just looks like a code editor. Like with the indents and the color-coding and whatnot. I see you, Larian developers. You went with the familiar (and it works surprisingly well).

Update: 9/28/23 - We Do It Not Because It Is Easy, But Because We Thought It Would Be Easy

Writing page is finally live! Links to my two big ongoing projects on AO3 and a (currently inactive) link to a Fic/Fluff/Kinktober prompt challenge I'm attempting. I just got out from under a paying job and I've got some time before I need to dive into another, let's spend it writing schmoop and/or smut. (I really doubt I'll do much with the kinktober prompts; writing smut has just lost its appeal for me.) (On the other hand, using the prompts might make it more interesting again. Hm.) I also really need to work on Never Limited and Never Complete, my multi-part Psychonauts thing, but it's really involved and my brain is very tired.

That's really the biggest thing. Almost broke the site trying to figure out how folders work, but I fixed it mostly. I'm pretty sure if you don't almost break your website at least once you didn't actually update it.

Note that the only reason any of this got done is bc I tend to let my roommate take over the PS5 on her days off so I don't have any access to Baldur's Gate 3 today. Otherwise I would be doing that instead.

Update: 8/20/23

I was traveling and then Kiddo went back to school and then Kiddo got sick which got the REST of us sick and and and

There's an About page now! I don't know how I actually feel about it bc I'm in that weird personal/professional limbo I talked about before. I'm thinking about including a gamelog or at least a section for me to yell about video games; that's a real quick way to make me descend into madness.

It's late and I'm tired, I just wanted to do the thing before I forgot about it or got distracted again. (Fun fact: typing the word "distracted" reminded me there was something I was supposed to do five minutes ago but I got distracted by updating the site.)(ADHD Is My Superpower). Sorry if you follow and got one million Updated notifications; usually I use my unlisted tester page but I thought it would be simpler than it wound up being (read: I forgot how make site go).

Update: 7/6/23

Haven't done anything on the site on account of straining my hand somehow (jury's out but the probable verdict is carpal tunnel) and having to prioritize paying work. And a bunch of Nimona icons, oops (please watch Nimona). And I'll be visiting my parents from tomorrow through next Sunday, so it's not likely I'll get much done there, unless I decide I want to try to mess with it on my ipad. (Only thing I miss about having a laptop: the portability.) Might try to cobble together a brief About page, idk.

Trying very hard not to make these update posts sound so...stiff? Idk, I know I use chatspeak or whatever but this is still nowhere near my more "conversational" style. Kind of related (I guess) but I absolutely love the emergence of online vernacular, the efforts to convey tone without the use of rich text editing. I often use it instead of markdown or rich text, bc the vibe is so different. "this" is not the same as "thIS" is not the same as "t h i s". It's like that thing where you say the same sentence over and over but emphasize a different word each time. "I never said she stole my money" vs "I never said she stole my money" vs "I never said she stole my money", so on and so forth. Totally different meaning and vibe each time.

ANYWAY. No About page yet, maybe soon, but probably not within the next week. Maybe not until August when Kiddo is back in school and I have a more enforceable schedule again, and also bc we have to go into school prep whirlwind mode right after we get back from the visit. Back in MY day we didn't go back until SEPTEMBER. (I have a very vivid memory of my 6th grade english teacher complaining that Labor Day fell during the first week of school, and then fall break was like two weeks later for some unknonwn reason.) The point is: not yet.

(possible to-do: rename page "an avalanche of parentheticals")

Update: 7/1/23

Socials page is created and also renamed the Find Me page. I took the link to my livetweet twitter off bc twitter is currently doing its best Chernobyl imitation, and cohost might go up in its place (if I actually utilize my cohost ever). Did add my icon blog on Dreamwidth, however.

There are fireworks going off in my neighborhood, what in hell. It is the FIRST, you pyromaniacs.

Anyway. I also made buttons instead of text links just because it looks cleaner. I'm aware Ko-fi has premade buttons available but I have an ~*~aesthetic~*~ going okay. Currently hunting for a layout with a nice sidebar, or I'll just break down and teach myself to make one, who knows at this point. Barring that maybe an iframe for this update/blog section. (Remember what I said last time about my lofty ambitions?)

About will probably be next, and Writing will likely be the last to come bc it's gonna require a non-zero amount of sub-pages and also possibly its own separate layout just to make reading easier on the eyes. Unless I find an overall layout that works for that. Only time will tell!

PS: amazing how much cleaner a site looks with one (1) indentation

Update: 6/30/23

I haven't used HTML regularly since The Livejournal Days, so setting this up was An Ordeal (and a lot of re-learning). (I also never really grokked CSS, so what little I know from minutely adjusting premade Tumblr layouts is only barely applicable.) (God bless you, free layout coders, you power the internet.) I had a plethora of Geocities sites back in the day but that was from the use of their WYSIWYG editor, where I could just place stuff and it generated the HTML for me. Excellent for my tiny personal fanfiction archive, not so much for me actually learning or retaining anything.

In the coming days there will be a page for my writing and a page for my art, and I'll either figure out Shopify integration (maybe) or just aggressively link my Ko-fi shop (probably that one). I'm trying to think small in the moment, since lofty ambitions have absolutely kneecapped me in the past.

In the meantime I'm gonna go wrangle the Socials page, since I suspect that's gonna be my biggest enemy, and maybe make some buttons or something, idk. I should probably figure out my own mess before I go trying to make friends.

This stylesheet cobbled together by EGGRAMEN in 2022.