Spring Cleaning

So I decided to go back and remove all the really personal entries (mostly whining, not all that interesting for anyone but me) in this blog and make it public again. Unlike before, this is now just a fandom blog and not a personal one. I have it set for 'adult content' for safety because I sometimes talk about fandom porn tropes, not because I have anything actually explicit here. I should also point out that my opinions are my own, and if people disagree with me that's fine. I have my own reasons for liking or disliking things, and I'm not trying to force my views on anyone else. That said, if someone has something interesting and non-offensive (no trolls!) to say than I am open to seeing other points of view.

Ha! Didn't wait a year to update!

Not much has changed since my last update actually. I'm still in the Homestuck fandom, though I've gotten to the point where I can read fic in other fandoms again and only check for new fic occasionally. I've also made progress on rereading Undocumented Features. I've been rereading it chronologically from the start and have made it to near the end of the year 2407 at this point. Incidentally, there's been some really great fics written earlier in the chronology that I had been missing by just rereading the SotS arc over and over, some of which are rewrites of old stories and other of which are just awesome additions. I've especially been fond of the fics that bring in the Mass Effect universe and various other game universes that, unlike earlier game universes, I've actually played. Also, the Skyrim mini-cross was awesome.

That said, I recently got Skyrim to work on my computer. Apparently all I needed to do is turn the graphics down to low. I still want to upgrade my computer (and need to since I've still several games that won't play properly) but I can at least play the game I really want to now. Yay.

The other things that have been distracting me lately are a) Tumblr, and b) trying to learn how to crochet.

Still Alive

It's been awhile since I last updated here. In fact, I think my last update was a rant about certain fandom tropes I hate. I'm pretty sure I was either still in the Avengers or Teen Wolf fandom... or in between fandoms.


On the fandom front...
Early on in April, for reasons I no longer remember, I decided to give the Homestuck fandom another try.

Now I'll admit that I'd been vaguely interested in the Homestuck fandom for a while, mostly because a) I kept seeing people mention it, and b) because it looked to have a fairly sizable fandom on AO3.  I vaguely recall skimming through the first two Acts on the MSPA wiki and even making a halfhearted attempt to read the first Act of the comic itself once. Needless to say I didn't get very far on either front since the first Act of Homestuck is both silly and slow paced, and there is a lot of unfamiliar terminology to keep track of for a newbie. The wiki helped a little, but I never really read far enough ahead on the summary pages to see any reason to continue reading back then. I bookmarked it, and then moved on. That was sometime in August last year according to the time-stamp on the bookmark.
 
So three months ago, in the early days of April, I decided to give Homestuck another try. I can't remember why, although it could be as simple as seeing the amount of fic on AO3 was enough that it would take more than a few days to read though the fandom completely, or it could be because I saw an interesting looking crossover. I can't remember. Wait. No. I do remember.

It did start with a crossover that looked really interesting- I think I was a Doctor Who crossover- but the important thing was that it specified that knowledge up to ACT 5 was essential to understand anything. And so, with a potentially good fic as incentive, I decided to actually sit down and read enough of the web comic that I could read the story I wanted to read. This time I made it though to the end of Act One, and with one small but awesome flash animation I was hooked.

According to my History, I was poking back into the DC comics fandom until the 6th of April, where my History starts early Act 2 and indicates that I read until mid Act 4until the 7th pretty much non-stop. I seem to have then taken a break to check on various fic and the like until the 11th, where I began reading Homestuck again from my 'saved game' in Act Four and continued reading until  I reached ACT 6 ACT 5 ACT 2: The Trickster Act, which I thought was a good stopping point. Incidentally, this was on April 15th, the day after it was announced that Homestuck was going on hiatus for 'months'. Said hiatus actually only turned out to be two months, but that still seemed like a good enough stopping point so as not to have to suffer any cliff hangers. Also, it was a good point at which to finally enter fandom.

Before I go on, however, I should point out that my original plan of spending a few days reading up to the end of ACT 5 to read a random crossover should have been completely impossible. I was basing this assumption on the general lengths of other web-comics, and expected to read it in maybe three days to a week at a fairly leisurely pace, maybe in between reading fic and doing other things. I was completely oblivious to Homestuck's status as one of the longest web-comics on the internet.
Here is a list containing the number of pages for each arc:

ACT 1 - 247
ACT 2 - 511
ACT 3 -  395
INTERMISSION -204
ACT 4 - 631
ACT 5 ACT 1 - 636
ACT 5 ACT 2 -  1483
INTERMISSION 2 - 2
ACT 6 ACT 1 - 182
ACT 6 INTERMISSION 1 - 125
ACT 6 ACT 2 -247
ACT 6 INTERMISSION 2 - 153
ACT 6 ACT 3 - 443
ACT 6 INTERMISSION 3 - 175
ACT 6 ACT 4 - 3
ACT 6 INTERMISSION 4 - 72
ACT 6 ACT 5 - 415 (ACT 1 - is 202 page and ACT 2 is 64 and ACT 1 X2 is 149)
ACT 6 INTERMISSION 5 - 309
ACT 6 ACT 6 ACT 1 - ongoing

This means that, from ACT 1 to ACT 6 ACT 1 , I read 5711 pages of comics in a bit under a week, the majority being in between April 11th and April 15th. That isn't counting the times spent playing the various awesome browser games and waiting for the flash animations to load. In that time I pretty much only slept very little. The following are timestamps for when I was on the MSPA site on those days according to my browser history.

April 11th - 9:06 PM -11:42 PM
April 12th 12:03AM- 7:02 AM,  11:48 AM- 11:58 PM
April 13th 12:01 AM - 6:27 AM, 6:48 PM- 11:53 PM
April 14th -  12:01 AM - 5:01 AM. 12:45 PM- 11:59 PM
April 15th   12:03 AM - 3:30 AM, 12:09 PM- 11:42 PM

I don't actually recall much of that week other than reading Homestuck. Apparently I was acting so obsessively that my family was concerned about me and my sister was starting to talk to me like I was a crazy person. I once freaked out because she was making the internet slow by downloading an update for her phone.

Anyway. After the 15th I dove into the fandom and pretty much stayed there for the rest of the month, starting with fic that was recommended on Television Tropes. By the end of April I had mostly read all the 'big name' fics in the fandom, minus one or two that were too angst ridden or contained subject matter that I find disturbing (ie. Hivefled and its predecessor, and one or two of the 'Helmsman' fics), and a bunch that I simply wasn't in the mood for at the time.

I spent almost the entirety of May really sick with the flu-from-hell, and thus spent that time re-reading favorite fic, reading though the entirety of the Homestuck kink-meme, and going through the AO3 Homestuck section reading a lot of the fic I missed the first time. This continued in through June, and although I still have a few on my 'pending' list  I've moved on to the the 'check every day for updates while poking into alternative mediums' stage. This means that I'm pretty much at that point where I'm 'in between' fandoms- not wanting to move on, but no longer having a surplus of unread fic.

However... as it happens, the Homestuck fandom has somehow reminded me of my old love of SPACE OPERA. There are some great Homestuck fics involving adventures and tragedies IN SPACE, but having been reminded how much I once loved that genre, I found myself strangely nostalgic for old favorite books and fics.

As it turns out, I somehow do not have e-book versions of the specific series I wanted to reread on my computer, and most of my actual books are still in storage and inaccessible... and I own the library money and a book that I lost almost two years ago now... but! It's been a long time since I read Undocumented Features, which has been my favorite SPACE OPERA universe for a long time. Okay, so admittedly, I tend to reread the Symphony of the Sword arc every few years, until I reach the unfinished arc and get annoyed by the time skip and the fact that the series isn't being updated as frequently as it used to. However, it's been a really long time since I reread UF from the start, and so that is what I am currently doing in between checking for updates, checking job postings for the illusive 'job I qualify for that isn't a cashier or server' and occasionally taking the time to watch various home improvement shows or play Kingdoms of Amalur.

So...

 I started playing Risen today. I have never died so quickly on 'easy' mode in any game in my life. I could just be wandering around and then suddenly! Wild boars attack! Or a bog monster, or a vulture! And one time I went too far out into the water and this giant appeared and threw me back onto the island. Its definitely a game where saving frequently is important. I hope the sequel is a bit easier.
Also, I saw the new trailer for FFXIII Lightning Returns. Looks like my original thought that everyone except for Lightning was dead was wrong, since Hope was narrating a bit and Noel was there and apparently someone who looked a bit like Serah.

Meh.

Some of my fondest memories growing up were of playing RPGs on whichever console we had at the time. We didn't always have every console and we couldn't afford many video-games so I rented them a lot, but my favorite games were always RPGs, and I considered Square-Enix games to be the best of the best when it came to stories, characters, and gameplay. In fact, Squeenix logo used to be all I'd need to see to want a game since at least early on the company tended to share things like magic systems and common items between the games even without being in the same 'series' and that was nice for me since I tended to play for the story and the characters more than the chance to have a completely new set up of battle screen, inventory, and leveling up every game. I mean, there were always some differences and there was some strategy and challenge to playing, but I always considered the random encounters to be a tedious but necessary evil, not something I wanted to be more challenging so it would take longer to get to the parts of the games I liked. Over the years though, even though the graphics have become absolutely amazing, games have been suffering from too much focus on the things I never really liked, story-lines that are too linear, and not enough focus on characters. Or maybe I've gotten picky. I hadn't realized how much had changed though, until I decided not to get a Squeenix game on sale super cheap after only seven minutes playing the demo and about ten browsing through the forums to see what other people thought about it. And I realize now that it isn't even just Squeenix but JRPGs in general that I've been becoming disenchanted from.

I think that the main issues are that: a) I don't have the patience for turn based or epically long battles anymore, b) most JRPGs feature main characters that are way too young for me to properly identify with anymore -and when you play a game and the first thing you think of is 'where the hell are these kids' parents and why the hell isn't anyone in the game concerned that these pre-teens are running around with dangerous weapons and without adult supervision?' than the characters are too young. c) I've become fond of actually fighting my enemies myself and not have a battle screen or a zillion menus- it's nice to just equip your weapons, set your party to fight the way you want and finish the battle right then and there instead of having to wait your turn and button mash for an hour. Final Fantasy 12 had the best battle system of all of Squeenix's games except maybe Kingdom Hearts (at least the KH games that didn't have those stupid card-game battles) in my opinion. If they'd done that with 13 I might have finished it. d) also JRPGs tend to have terrible voice acting.


Anyway. Nap time since I have to work tomorrow.

Sales are mean

So I was doing my usual poke into the Steam store to see if there was anything I wanted on sale last night... Well thity-five dollars later I found myself with Risen and the Ultimate version of Dragon Age Origins. I still have twelve dollars left. Must resist.

Coffee for the Win

So I got one of those Tassimo coffee machines a while back. I thought it would be a good investment considering how much I like expensive coffees and lattes, and how much cheaper it would be if I just made them myself instead of buying them, but I forgot to take into account a few details. Like the fact that I don't actually buy expensive coffee all that often now that I don't live in walking distance of a cafe, and that even if seven to twelve dollars for eight cups of coffee/tea/hot chocolate is a great deal compared to three to six dollars for one cup in a cafe, it is not all that great a deal if you are going to be drinking those fancy coffees frequently. Basically, I've been spending twice as much for a  few cups of (admittedly really good) chai tea latte as I would for a large can of Nabob which can make dozens of cups of coffee. Not my best investment, but still completely worth it for the taste and convenience.

In fandom news, I've been all over the place lately. I've been a bit flighty about finding a new main fandom since the last few I looked into were fairly small or dying off to the extent that they had been around long enough that most of the original fic writers for those fandoms have already moved on, leaving a trail of unfinished epics left behind due to lack of interest. That's one of the worst things when you go back to old fandoms: finding out that all of your old favorites that were unfinished when you left are still unfinished when you come back. Currently I'm poking around in the Supernatural fandom, but it probably won't last since that is a fandom that contains a lot of things I tend to avoid (like RPF -it's cannon even!- and for the longest time the main slash pairing was incest, which is so not my thing even in fiction). Also, I'm getting more and more annoyed with the Buffy Crossover fandom. I used to like Xander centered fic back in the old days, when his characterization actually matched what existed in canon.  These days though, it seems like no one remembers that there are any characters *other* than Xander and his characterization and motivations in fanon are so far away from his canon characterization these days that it isn't even funny. Seriously, part of what made him an interesting character was that he didn't have super-powers and still fought anyway. the most annoying thing though, is that these Xander-Stu fics have become so popular that it seems like that's almost all there is anymore. Other BtVS characters may as not even exist, or are killed off, made into the villains, or just so badly characterized that I wonder if the writer has ever even seen an episode of Buffy. I used to be able to find lots of great fic at Twisting the Hellmouth, but these days its getting harder and harder to find anything even moderately readable and at this point I think I'd be happy just for fic centered on someone other than Xander- even for a power-up fic. Meh.