Updates

Jul. 11th, 2025 09:36 pm
soc_puppet: [Homestuck] God tier "Life" themed Dreamsheep (Sheep of Life)
[personal profile] soc_puppet
1) Intro to Sociology was successfully dropped, not long after I got home from taking the first class. That setup (the extremely packed schedule plus a super strict teacher) was not for me.

2) I've had some mild financial bullshit with college, but hopefully it's well on its way to being all sorted out.

3) All of my Speech homework for this week? I accidentally did last week 😂 Honestly, much better than the other way around.

4) In less college related news, I finally got my car back from the shop 😭 It took more than a week to get my internal fans fixed, but I am not dealing with summer around here without AC. Especially for thirty minute drives and little to no shade parking.

5) I finally finished properly outlining my first story for Sot69 this year 👀 I am pleased with what I've come up with and how I'm getting the characters into position! I'm really looking forward to actually writing it now 😃
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
Especially while it's at 75% off in the sale, making it 62p:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/406150/Refunct/

For anyone who might want to sample some easy platforming with a very very low entry threshold.

Chill and rather lovely environment (okay, probably depends on you liking brutalist architecture, but still -- there's a day-night cycle! there's sunshine! the water is gorgeous! the music is gentle!) with no time pressure and no penalties for failing a jump hundreds of times (except that, at worst, you fall in the water and have to swim about and haul yourself out again).

N.B. Most reviews describe this as a half-hour game, and there are achievements for speedrunning it in under 8 minutes or under 4 minutes.

It took me over five hours of playtime to beat it, which should be indicative of the co-ordination and skill levels I'm working with here. And yet it did not at any point feel stressful or humiliating for me. It felt like a pleasant, relaxing environment in which to fail repeatedly and experiment.

It started at a level low enough that I could manage it, and then had a really satisfying difficulty curve. If I was stalling on the next objective, I could still run and parkour round the environment purely for fun (and sometimes ended up working out how to pick off the optional achievements in the process).

Towards the very end, I started to think that the last jumps might just flat-out exceed the limits of what I am currently capable of, and it felt like if that did happen, I would still be able to walk away pretty happily having already got way more than 62p's worth of enjoyment out of it.

Will absolutely be playing it again.

Argh? Argh.

Jul. 7th, 2025 10:58 pm
soc_puppet: A young man with glasses and messy brown hair staring blankly (and somewhat tiredly) at the viewer, as if he has just been informed of some outlandish news that he should have somehow expected. (You have GOT to be kidding me)
[personal profile] soc_puppet
First Intro to Sociology class was today!

The professor is an out nonbinary person and very assertive about it. And very assertive about a lot of things. Like no screens in the classroom, yes this includes laptops, but also don't turn in anything handwritten, that will get an automatic zero. Also, remember that deep breathing exercise we did to start class? Now you know that you are always in control! Even if you have some sort of anxiety thing, you are still in control, because you can control your breathing! Also they have a pet peeve about loud yawning, this means you, random student who just yawned. Also also they don't do the compliment sandwich method of feedback because it takes too much time.

...Yeah. I promptly dropped the class, with plenty of time for a full refund, because I really, really don't think this teaching style would mesh well with my ADHD. And that's not even getting into the extremely punishing course schedule.

Sadly, they are also the only professor who teaches LTBTQ+ Studies, which I am currently registered for in the fall semester; I plan to meet with my academic advisor ASAP and switch that class to something else, because no, thank you, actually? No, thank you.
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
A whole world of games not playable on Mac has opened up to me, and it's Steam summer sale time!

Please rec me your favourite games, bearing in mind that I have very limited reflexes/co-ordination.

(I'm not completely ruling out games involving them, but the threshold for entry has to be very very low. I am currently enjoying Refunct because it allows me to try some simple platforming in a very chill and pleasant environment with no time pressure and no penalties for taking several hundred tries to get a jump.)

MXTX stuff

Jul. 4th, 2025 06:11 pm
soc_puppet: A screencap of Namine from "Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories". She is pictured scribbling in her notebook, but an excerpt reads, "And then Axel and Roxas had hot, steamy sex. The End." (Fangirl writer)
[personal profile] soc_puppet
I finally finished listening to the main story of MDZS! There was some delay for various reasons, mostly related to my car's failing fan motor, but I managed to get to the end 🎉 (Minus the extras. But those can wait.)

Definitely love the story; don't know if I have any particular fandom feels about it, though. SVSSS still has my heart in that regard.


Speaking of, a stray thought: I'm about 90% sure that the "Immortal" part of "Proud Immortal Demon Way" is specifically referring immortal human cultivators, and thus Binghe's heritage. He is both immortal in the human cultivator sense, and a demon. I'm obviously not one hundred percent sure here, but it makes enough sense in context that it just kinda... tickles my brain occasionally when I see alternate interpretations.


Anyway, provided I can find a way to rip my Audible library, I'll probably listen to TGCF next, but we'll see what happens.

Speech: Humanitarian Rats

Jul. 3rd, 2025 11:40 am
soc_puppet: A gray masked dumbo rat wearing a Dreamwidth cheerleading outfit and waving red color-matched pompoms (Cheering you on)
[personal profile] soc_puppet
I may as well share this here.

Humanitarian Rats )

Works Cited )

current reading (spolsky 1/?)

Jul. 2nd, 2025 03:56 pm
thistleingrey: (Default)
[personal profile] thistleingrey
In almost two months, I've read about 15% of Bernard Spolsky's The Languages of the Jews (slowness is a me-issue). By the 15% point, the book has summarized contemporary usage of Hebrew in Israel, then begun examining historical usage of Hebrew from earliest to more recent. So far, Spolsky tries to assert rather than tuck away his assumptions, which I appreciate. I've read some work by philologists and historical linguists on other language families, and a historical treatment by a sociolinguist who's aware of his strengths is a lovely thing.

a couple of the book's assumptions and something cool it does with them )

My speech will be on Apopo

Jul. 1st, 2025 07:26 pm
soc_puppet: Dreamsheep, its wool colored black and shot through with five diagonal colored lines (red, yellow, white, blue, and green, from left to right), the design from Dreamwidth user capri0mni's Disability Pride flag. The Dreamwidth logo is in red, yellow, white, blue, and green, echoing the stripes. (Disability Pride)
[personal profile] soc_puppet
Okay! Time to buckle down and write my informative speech outline!

(I am 100% going to talk to my Speech teacher about the possibility of getting an early start on our final speech, because this whole "Write a speech to present in one week" thing is just. No. No? No, thank you, I do not care for that.)

After that, I can get back to the important work of figuring out how to get characters in the correct position for a Sot 69 fic.
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
* SAVE OFTEN, especially in the early game when you may be very fragile and the game's auto-save is infrequent.

BUT -- don't reload from a save unless you actually die or otherwise hit a "game over."

This game is about failing, and it rewards you for playing forwards through failure. Some of the best moments in the game come from failed checks. There are always alternative routes and ways forwards. If you tried to savescum it, you would miss most of the game and all of the point. Embrace failure.

Okay there are those two specific checks where failing is so emotionally devastating I would not judge anyone for savescumming. But apart from those.

* You can just pick one of the Archetypes for a starter build, and leave messing around with custom character creation until you've seen the stats in action and understand how the system works. Don't stress about it. Or, if you want, you can throw yourself into custom character creation despite not having a clue how it works, and you will also have a fun time. Your initial build and your later choices about what you put points into will radically change your experience of the game, but you can't do it "wrong"; there are no optimal builds which are "better".

* Press tab to highlight objects you can interact with, or activate "detective mode" in the settings to do it automatically. Yes I know this is the sort of thing that is probably obvious to people who have played video games before.

* If your Health or Morale (displayed on the lower left of the screen) fall to zero, you have about 5 seconds to apply a healing item (if you have one) by clicking the cross above that stat.

This is the one timed element in the game, and also the one mechanic that some of us initially have trouble grasping.

With all the other mechanics in the game, you can not only learn them by flinging yourself in and floundering about, this is IMHO the best and most enjoyable way to learn them. No idea what the Thought Cabinet is or what Internalizing A Thought means? Try it and find out!

* Perhaps the most important tip of all:

If you feel you are flailing around and failing on most of the checks you try and you've just been informed you have acquired a Thought you can internalize in your Thought Cabinet and you have no clue what that means or maybe you just had a heart attack and died before you even got out of your hotel room or you had a nervous breakdown because a child insulted you and you have no idea what you're doing and it's been three days and you still haven't got the body down from the tree --

THIS DOES NOT MEAN YOU ARE PLAYING THE GAME "BADLY". THIS IS IN FACT THE UNIVERSAL DISCO ELYSIUM EXPERIENCE AND MEANS YOU ARE PLAYING THE GAME CORRECTLY. WELL DONE.

Pokémon Go Fest 2025

Jun. 29th, 2025 10:47 pm
soc_puppet: Dreamsheep on the Pokemon GO location background (Pokesheep Go)
[personal profile] soc_puppet
I spent the past two days going more-or-less all out for Go Fest, and honestly I had a blast. I did a bunch of raids, got two shiny Zamazenta (one with the special background) and five shiny Zacian (no special backgrounds on any of these, alas), and am honestly pretty pleased with my shiny hoard overall. In addition to those, I got one of my longtime shiny wants: A shiny Pachirisu!

It's also been as hot and humid as a frog's armpit the past week or so, which made all that walking around... interesting. I did my best to stay hydrated and cool off as needed, and chugged more Gatorade than I initially anticipated, but I've come out the other side more-or-less fine. I did end up with more chafing than I expected, most of it in the usual places (only some of which I thought to apply preventative measures to, alas), and at least one surprise new place (my right underarm, just a little past my armpit region). I expect I'll need to keep those in mind for next year, alas. On the plus side, none of the chafing spots have blisters, which I am tentatively crediting my anti-sweat medication for.

Anyway, all that out of the way, I would like to announce that I've come up with the perfect nicknames for shiny versions of this weekend's legendaries:

Zamagenta and Zacyan.

PSA

Jun. 29th, 2025 01:54 pm
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
[personal profile] rydra_wong
Disco Elysium is currently 90% off in the Steam summer sale, making it a mere £3.49.

Play Disco Elysium, everybody. Yes, even if you don't play video games.

(It was the first video game I ever played -- apart from having once(?) played Pac Man as a child, many many decades ago -- and it was a perfect choice.)

If you understand the principle of a Choose Your Own Adventure book, have a vague sense that "stats" and "levelling up" are things, and can grasp "click to go to a place/interact with an object," you are sufficiently equipped.

ETA: Okay, I will add in [personal profile] astrogirl's excellent content warning:

It's definitely not for everybody. I mean, for one thing, it gets pretty much all the trigger warnings for everything. Alcoholism and substance abuse, suicidal thoughts, discussions of sexual assault, gore (not visual, but some of the descriptions are very vivid), you name it. A number of characters are giant racists. (Towards fictional races/ethnicities, mind you, but it's still ugly.) Evil children will hurl homophobic slurs at you. That sort of thing. And whatever your politics, the game will try very hard to make you feel uncomfortable about them.

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