Friend Feeds
Tumblr's recent reblog change and subsequent rollback has led users to pick up alternate social media. THIS IS EXCELLENT. I'm a big advocate of spreading your internet footprint across multiple sites. I've been meaning to set up a centralized social RSS so I can keep up with friends wherever, not just when I occasionally poke my head into one dash or another. This gave me the push I needed to start collecting everyone's RSS feeds.
I use Feeder on Android and Feedbro on desktop.
- AO3 - See FAQ
- Bluesky - RSS automatically discoverable from the user's profile page. It's not human readable. Example:
- https://bsky.app/profile/ren.shittycasual.club
- https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:k7w7qvflmokud2plbogjrsod/rss
- Backloggd - Provides RSS for reviews at https://backloggd.com/u/(user)/reviews/
- Dreamwidth - https://(user).dreamwidth.org/data/rss
- Instagram - I wasn't able to find an official RSS feed, but Feedbro automatically grabs posts using the profile url
- Mastodon - https://(server)/users/(user).rss
- NeoCities - Provides a limited site update RSS for users who haven't built something more comprehensive at https://neocities.org/site/(user).rss
- Pillowfort - Doesn't have RSS. You can use RSS Bridge by finding an instance that supports Pillowfort. I'm currently using rss-bridge.cheredeprince.net
- Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/(subreddit).rss or https://www.reddit.com/u/(user).rss
- Tumblr - https://(name).tumblr.com/rss
I use folders to create a master feed for each user.
Could I humbly suggest having a landing page?
Some people use NeoCities or sites like linktree for socials lists. Dreamwidth has a space for social links on the profile page.
Dreamwidth is my ground zero in the event other platforms go down.
Fanfiction: Ad Libitum (The Goes Wrong Show, Robert/Chris)
Here's a game you can play: see if you can guess what Chris named the main characters in his play before you read this, on the assumption that Chris just asked himself 'what names do gay men have?'
Title: Ad Libitum
Fandom: The Goes Wrong Show
Rating: 14
Pairing: Robert/Chris
Wordcount: 1,800
Summary: Chris and Robert play lovers on stage. Things do not go as planned.
( Ad Libitum )
Post and Jam: High School Confidential by Rough Trade [1980]
Continuing my list of fifty Canadian songs I love from the past fifty years, how could I kick off the '80s and not go for some pulpy lesbian new wave?
High School Confidential by Rough Trade
What's Making Me Happy Today: Starfleet Academy
I didn't initially think this show was going to be for me. Hopefully it goes without saying that this wasn't for any of the range of awful reasons people have wanted to hang a grievance or grift on it. Media with protagonists in their teens and twenties just usually aren't my thing, and so while I was glad to see Trek branching out, I went in aware I wasn't the target audience and figured I'd watch an episode or two to see if any of the older characters appealed to me.
Well, they definitely did. Free-spirited, complex, centuries-old school chancellor Nahla Ake might be my favourite character I've met this year. I am in love with her. The Doctor (from Voyager) and Jett Reno (from Discovery) are both back in supporting roles with some really wonderful scenes, and Jett has a hot and hilarious Klingon/Jem'Hadar wife (Lura Thok) who is definitely worth moving across the galaxy for.
But to my surprise, I also really love the kids! Not all the moments landed for me, but I ended up legitimately invested in their coming-of-age stories and journey into becoming a little family. I don't want to spoil some of the things I loved, but I am always here for mentorship, adoptive parent-child relationships, and queer romance, and I wasn't disappointed. Add in some good solid science fiction and a lot of classic Trek optimism and belief in the work of building a better world, and this was exactly what I needed right now. My only real complaint is that it was such a short season.
3SF 26 #26
FF7, Barret, Cloud(/Tifa/Aerith) - having two girlfriends is easy - you just let them tie you up and do whatever they want to you
Transformers G1, Hot Rod, Optimus, implied Op/Megatron - did you love him?
Transformers G1, Optimus/Jazz - if you were a king, I'd be your ___
Slice & Dice, Acolyte - your tiny fandom that i've probably never heard of, any, this is your excuse to write more fics for it
and now for something completely different
So I've been watching bits and pieces of that, as well as all of The Royal Ballet's Cinderella. I therefore offer you some fully random observations, from someone who never got into any kind of dance as a kid, and therefore knows baaaaaasically nothing about the topic. (I have been to several ballets in person, The Nutcracker of course, and the Winnipeg Ballet's Svengali..)
- I like classical ballet (I'm not really watching modern) because it's quite ridiculous, and unconnected to anything that has ever happened on the face of the Earth.
- I have learned that there's dialogue! Classical ballet has a kind of sign language, done through gestures, so that the dancers can explain plot points such as "We make evil men dance until they die!" and "This lake is made of my mother's tears!"
- There does not seem to be much point to the male principal dancers. They have thighs like birch trees, which allows them to leap impressively high in the air, but they don't spin around on nothing but their big toe, which makes them less interesting to watch. Their main purposes seems to be to move the plot along, and act as a "Ballerina holder upper."
- Maybe it's just because I'm not good enough at reading the mime, but the romantic dances are... not very romantic. They mostly seem to be the ballerina holder upper holding up the ballerina while she spins around on her big toe.
- I don't know if there's non-transphobic/misogynistic way to do the comedy roles where male dancers play female characters, but Cinderella sure didn't manage it.
- The plot of Giselle is really interesting (boy meets girl, girl dies when she finds out that boy has a fiancée, girl joins chorus of vengeful ghosts, vengeful ghosts attempt to kill boy, girl saves boy), and I wonder if there have been modern retellings like there have of other old fairytales.
- I'm pretty sure the human body is not designed to do any of that.
Which is all I have for now.
~GoodBYE, Columbo
I sent out the next Vargas chapter to be beta'd so it's happening!! Depends on when I hear back from her and how long I decide to fret about it before I post it, haha. It always feels like such an event to me! It's nice to get the ball rolling on it though.
I went back and fixed the broken images in the giant sketchposts at least, although posts with individual images are still broken. I figured the giant posts would be the ones people would most likely be looking at, haha. Relive the memories! Or not! I can't tell you what to do!
In terms of my cool music page, I added two more cassettes I found! One called "Radio Picks 92" which really only has a handful of songs and, mysteriously, Silent Lucidity like four times in a row?? If it was me who recorded it I don't know what I was thinking. The other one is "Special tape for car only" which despite its name just has very normal music on it. BACK BEFORE MY TASTE IN MUSIC BECAME TERRIBLE BEYOND BELIEF
If I decide to do any more tapes maybe I should set up a second page, it seems long with just the four on it already! Or maybe my resolution is just too small.
On a related note, there is now also an ipod on that shelf! You can click it to get to a new page for my car playlist, which is like 1300+ songs long at current. No downloads or links for that one because christ but I have been working on a youtube mirror of the playlist, although I'm only like 900 songs through it. You can get a taste of it though!
Setting up the ipod to flip open on hover was really annoying, I ended up trying like a few different methods and running into weird roadblocks before I got it doing what I wanted. Tough to get it to stay in place too! Getting a good shot of the ipod itself I could use was also annoying, I went through like three different versions of it open/closed before I decided on this one. It looks so realistic on the shelf!
I also made some Teeny Tower rooms!

One for Horses because that's so inappropriate lol. I need to make a post about that at some point. I love how the little horses came out, cute and creepy at the same time, poor things. Had a hard time thinking of a background but then I figured I could work with the whole silent film/theater symbolism it has going through it.
BRAINLESS RAAANDYYYYY there is SO MUCH fog in the Illbleed cutscenes I swear
Hornet and Shakra are girlfriiieeenddsss god, everything in Hollow Knight/Silksong is so ornate and intricate, it was murder to try and get it all down into such a small space. I based it off of my bellhome in Silksong so I have all the relics in there and everything, haha. Very hard to get a sense of metallic surfaces on a small scale!
Something reminded me or made me think of how a lot of Undertale environments would make for good little rooms, so I went with Asgore's throne room first. He looks so cute!! Cutest tiny Asgore! The window was a pain to try and shrink down. It's interesting seeing this one set against all the others since it has dark outlines, which very few of my other rooms have. Really emphasizes how simplistic Undertale's art style is...
And the brothers' room! Well really it's all about the Mettaton TV, haha. Mettaton on every channel! He's gotta be doing something! I spent way too much time on all those little segments. I could still add one for the news if I felt ambitious...
And as a complete tonal shift, that one scene from Hereditary. If you've seen it you know! I wonder how recognizable it will be to people when it's so tiny? It was a lot of fun to recreate this, trying to balance the right amount of darkness in the doorway so you're not sure if you see something.
lj post
Rainbow Llamas
For all those who were wondering if my Farm Together 2 obsession ever stopped
NARRATOR: (absolutely no one wondered this)
It has not. And I must say, the recent inclusion of rainbow llamas is probably the best thing that happened to me all week.
Unclear why that screencap is so scronched but you get the idea. They are event critters, so I gotta grind some shit out to unlock them permanently. They are gonna live next to the unicorns.
A Reckoning of Swords 74
I do wish I'd put a little more forethought into how I'm logging what I've done, but I don't think there's any perfect solution there. After a point it'll be much easier, like when I'm just cruising through AO3 by fandom when there's only a few dense fandoms left. Right now I'm all over the place and logging things into composition books is getting kind of gnarly.
Worked a bit more on MG Tallgeese Flugel, but mostly worked on stuff for 30 Minute Label Day. Definitely not a prize-winning display, but a fun one. And that's honestly what I want - a fun display and one people can interact with. Like, I'll offer to let people touch, gently, and check out articulation and details and whatever. There's not much that can be broken beyond repair, if anything. Need to get back to my [Redacted] contest entry, too, as that's coming due very soon.
Goal for the week is getting my desk cleaned up. What even is going on here?!
Performing some traffic maintenance today
Happy Saturday!
I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!
If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.
Fatal Frame 2 Remake - first 2-ish chapters
So as I noted in my Demo review, they moved things around, and this is (mostly) great because it makes this old game feel fresh and new.
Combat is a bit of a slog and if you're a veteran player you're going to have to re-learn fighting. They did nerf things a bit so that people new to the game are not spending ten minutes fighting the early ghosts - now others are complaining that this makes the game too easy. While I get being rewarded for skill and strategy, a lot of the professional reviews for the game remarked how awful the combat was/how tanky the first few ghosts were in early game, and I have to agree (it also doesn't help that the tutorial screens need to be clearer and maybe set a little earlier).
It could be that they have to undo some of the nerfing to keep the challenge up, or leave the nerfing to the easiest setting, story mode, to make those fans that love the strategy bits of the new mechanics happier. I don't care. Keep the lower chance of the ghosts suddenly getting really pissed at you, that's all I ask.
I'm adoring the new areas, and I appreciate not having to backtrack to the first location to get (story item) like I did in previous games. Also, slightly more room to fight (story item guardian), which I really appreciate.
Apparently there are some stealth mechanics involved. Can I state how much I hate stealth mechanics? I didn't enjoy them in Fatal Frame 3 either.
On the trivia side, there is a new-ish Itsuki scene just before Mio meets him. I say new-ish because it looks like a reuse of a bit from one of the Wii remake endings. (Shadow Festival ending, to be precise, my favorite ending ever!) The Wii remake endings got cut for this game, but at least a bit of Shadow Festival lives on!
Post and Jam: Wondering Where the Lions Are by Bruce Cockburn [1979]
Continuing my list of fifty Canadian songs I love from the past fifty years, 1979's is one that's probably popped into my head at least one morning a week since I was five:
Wondering Where the Lions Are by Bruce Cockburn
HE'S HERE!!!!

and I am not complaining about the bonus fs2 Jun!!
Um, I don't have a lot else to talk about because I've just been in 24/7 Pokopia cycle...I definitely feel like it was worth buying a Switch 2 for and, as much as I hate to suggest dropping that much money on something, I highly recommend it. I finished that "story" of it and cried at the end, so like. idk. I don't have smart words right now because I'm hungry ;w;
I also took a bunch of screenshots while playing, because it's soooooooo fuckin cute and I wanna make icons of everything *w* But there's also sooooo much to do that I get overwhelmed, so I'm thinking of sitting down and making a Plan for each area instead of just running wild. I wanna make some nice towns!!!

ohhh my god right I named the area you can customize Double Face, because I'm weak
okay okay I'm starving I have to go feed myself
here and there
Did manage to crawl past my birthday without bonfire or getting arrested despite Familial Bullshit, though, so that's a bonus?
After having spent way too many years scratching my claws against the glass that is Final Fantasy and what Squenix has been doing to and with it, I've stopped yelling and started a replay of FFVII along with
Yoroi Shinden Samurai Troopers continues to be a goddamned joy, and I wish I could say I'm surprised to discover that the YST fandom in Japan is just as goddamn pathetically losing as the Western branch but nope, here we are.
Aside from that I've successfully pruned my icons here to 150 so I can drop to standard paid painlessly; I'm done paying for essentially nothing ("premium"), but I'm unhooking slowly. I still need to get the energy to make my own site, but tinkering around on omg.lol has been going well so far; I also got me some paid virtual hosting and spun up that tiny IRC server, but I think I might wipe the host and re-do as a Discourse server because forum+chat feels like it might be more useful in the future.
There's probably something else but I can't think of it right now.
It's Here!
Free to view now until the 18th, GMT, I assume.
links list (the Internet may be getting worse)
Great post from
404 Media: 'AI Is African Intelligence': The Workers Who Train AI Are Fighting Back.
Kenyan workers are still the underpaid labor behind AI training, moderation, and sex chatbots. The Data Labelers Association is fighting back.
The Verge: Grammarly is using our identities without permission.
When users select the 'expert review' button in the Grammarly sidebar, it analyzes their writing and surfaces AI-generated suggestions 'inspired by' related experts. Those 'industry-relevant perspectives' include the likes of Stephen King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Carl Sagan, among many others.
Wired: Grammarly Is Facing a Class Action Lawsuit Over Its AI 'Expert Review' Feature.
I'm sure everyone enjoys getting sued by Stephen King.
The Flytrap: Sex Workers Versus the Algorithm.
Mostly about payment processors, but also about filtering:
the endless dance around content bans requires constantly coming up with new ways to craft video titles and content that are frustrating not only for adult performers, but also their customers.
The Guardian: The world wants to ban children from social media, but there will be grave consequences for us all.
Age-verification systems require collecting sensitive data to support the biometric information. In no time, the internet will become a fully surveilled digital panopticon.
Canadian Politics
(I'm actually saving fewer links about this, because it's mostly pretty disheartening. And I can't deal.)
Desmond Cole fact checks his misinformation and explains how blaming the most vulnerable distracts us from fighting for good health care for all.
The Tyee: Advocates Hope a Ruling Will Change RCMP Treatment of Indigenous Witnesses.
But critics say the Canadian rights tribunal didn’t go far enough after finding police discrimination.
Nominally good news, but so much about this case pisses me off. $7k each? Seriously? Reminder that the one person who got state protection in all of this, the guy who (allegedly) abused all those people, is John Furlong. Fuck that guy.
The Breach: A notorious RCMP unit shaped B.C. universities’ reaction to Palestine encampments.
From Fairy Creek to university campuses, CRU-BC is positioning itself as the go-to police force for repressing dissent.
Category: jackbooted thugs.
Kind of Cool, Actually:
Words cannot express how validating this was. Lo! How many long years have I said that AL:VH is the most historically accurate Lincoln movie? HCR agrees.
The Tyee: What Can You Do with Used Plastic and 3D Printers? Meet Two Pros.
Not sure how scalable this is, but it's a cool project.
The Narwhal : In northeast B.C., fresh food is scarce. This First Nation hopes geothermal energy could change that.
Cool project to restore food security after Site C fucked it up, hopefully they can get funding.
I've really been enjoying the promo clips for this new ballet. I hope there's some way to watch it online.
(no subject)
Premium Bandai did varying price points of Gundam Kit Fukubukuro this year, and just put up a few more sets. I snagged one earlier in the year and thought it okay and after some dithering, picked up another. They've all been very good deals, as far as MSRP goes. Since the one I just ordered is still a mystery to everyone, I'm going to try to keep it a surprise til I open it. This is difficult because plenty of people will receive theirs first and post to discords/reddit.
I am still mired in various projects, so my poll is still open for just a smidge longer.
Also,
I also started playing Arknights again, kinda. I downloaded it onto a tablet so I could uninstall it from my phone (still there despite not playing in a year) and whoops, no guilt and a bunch of goodies, along with some nice QoL. Doubt I'll stick with it for more than a few weeks, but I did kinda miss everyone.
