rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
rydra_wong ([personal profile] rydra_wong) wrote2025-11-01 07:46 pm
Entry tags:

It's very important to me that you understand that Dark Souls is a deeply eccentric game



[Image description: my character seen from the back in a giant bird's nest perched on a ruined stone building. She is wearing a pointed crimson hat and a greyish-brown shawl over her shoulders, and holding a halberd in one hand. An option on the screen says "A: Curl up like a ball."]

(The reason you curl up like a ball is to pretend to be an egg so that a giant crow will transport you to another location. Obviously.)
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
rydra_wong ([personal profile] rydra_wong) wrote2025-11-01 09:34 am
Entry tags:

BABBDI: for all your liminal brutalist platforming needs



Available on Steam and Itch.io for the low low price of free:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2240530/BABBDI/
https://lemaitre-bros.itch.io/babbdi

The description says it's a short game but I've spent over 10 hours happily wandering around in it and there's definitely more to do.

Immensely satisfying traversal and exploration of a brutalist concrete cityscape full of weird nooks and hidden places to discover, using a series of different movement tools (as well as your own ability to jump) -- including a baseball bat (hit a surface to propel yourself in the opposite direction, including hitting the ground to go UP), leaf blower, motorcycle, pickaxe (climb any vertical walls by jumping and stabbing the pickaxe in, then repeating) and propeller, all of which are enormous fun to use.

(You can only carry one tool at a time, but there are multiple iterations of them scattered around the map, and if you lose something, after a while -- possibly requiring quitting and reloading, not sure -- it'll tend to respawn where you originally found it.)

None of the platforming has required more co-ordination than I have; there are things I could undoubtedly do more easily if I was a better platformer, but finding the right tool can get me there anyway.

And if you can see somewhere, it's real and you can get there, and sometimes you'll discover things to see or collect. Maybe you'll crawl through a sewer and discover a secret underground dance party. Maybe you'll randomly run across a hidden room that looks at first glance like it's monitoring surveillance cameras but turns out on closer inspection to be running Windows on multiple microwaves. Even the invisible wall round what appears to be the edge of the map has a gap in it, and you can sneak through it to get to the ship you can see in the distance; it's not a skybox.

No fall damage, no ticking clock, no combat, no jumpscares. The vibe is ambient vaguely-dystopian melancholic creepiness, but within that people are going about their lives (the woman lying in the garden pond is not dead; she's breathing and appears to be just chilling). I'm reminded of the origins of parkour in the neglected brutalist concrete environments of social housing in France.

Weird, relaxing, delightful.

(For anyone wondering, yes I am still very much playing Dark Souls, but I can only do so in moderate amounts per day, when I have mental energy, so I mix it up with other things too.)
sixbeforelunch: Sherlock Holmes and John Watson from the Grenada adaptation (holmes and watson 3)
Impossible Things ([personal profile] sixbeforelunch) wrote2025-10-27 09:49 pm

Drabble: Jelly-bean McQueen, Sherlock Holmes (ACD or Grenada)

It annoyed me that that meme was missing J of all letters. I asked [personal profile] kingstoken for a prompt and she gave me "jelly beans". I looked them up on Wikipedia and learned something new about early 20th century slang. And then I wrote a thing.

Jelly-bean McQueen

Sherlock's American informant was knowledgeable, but Watson found his dialect quite unintelligible at times. "I've heard him called Jelly-bean McQueen," the informant said, "And by golly it fits. That boy's a Jelly-bean if ever there was one."

"A what?" Watson asked.

"A Jelly-bean," Sherlock said.

"I am familiar with the confectionary, but what has it to do with our suspect?"

Sherlock tutted. "Really, Watson, you must keep up with the slang of the modern times. A Jelly-bean is young man made of more flash and style than substance, and generally quite idle. A fop. A dandy. Naturally."

"Oh, yes. Naturally."

---

(Per Wikipedia this slang came into use in the 1910s and 1920s, so it just fits the timeline of ACD-era Holmes.)


Also on AO3
sixbeforelunch: iron man on a pink background, text reads "everyone needs a hobby" (mcu - iron man hobby)
Impossible Things ([personal profile] sixbeforelunch) wrote2025-10-26 07:59 pm
Entry tags:

fic meme

Seen in a few places, but most recently via [personal profile] senmut

How many letters of the alphabet have you used for starting a fic title? One fic per line, ‘A’ and 'The’ do not count for 'a’ and ’t’. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.

A - Accented Interest (Stargate: SG1)
B - B'Minga (Star Trek: TNG)
C - Cadence (Star Trek: TNG)
D - Dah Vokaya (Star Trek: Expanded Universe)
E - Elephant Jokes (the only slightly evil remix) (Stargate: SG1)
F - f'(x) (MCU)
G - get your swagger on (MCU)
H - Hafayat (Star Trek: Expanded Universe)
I - Illusory Reality (Star Trek: TOS/Vulcans Glory)
J - nada
K - Kal'i'farr heh T'naehm (Star Trek: Expanded Universe)
L - Laid Bare (Star Trek: TNG)
M - Masu-kastra (Star Trek: Expanded Universe)
N - Nailed My Faith to the Sticking Pole (Stargate SG1)
O - Of Quadruple Weddings and All You Can Eat Seafood (Stargate SG1)
P - Pessum (Star Trek: TNG)
Q - Quality Time (Star Trek: TNG)
R - Reciprocity of Care (Star Trek: TNG)
S - Safe Landing (Key Largo)
T - Tea and Company (Sherlock Holmes)
U - Unconventional Courtship (DCU)
V - Vaunah (Star Trek: Expanded Universe)
W - Waiting Game (Star Trek: TOS)
X - XFVCU 1x07 : Prism (X-Files)
Y - Yel-nel-dath (Star Trek: Expanded Universe)
Z - Z is for Zenith (Stargate: SG1)

25/26, although "X" squeaked by on a bit of a technicality. I've currently got 198 stories posted on AO3. I've also written in more fandoms than this list would suggest. I sorted in alphabetical order and grabbed the first one I saw for each letter, but for whatever Star Trek got heavily weighted. I have written a lot of Star Trek, but I don't think it makes up half of all of the stories I've written so. Huh.

mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
Mark Smith ([staff profile] mark) wrote in [site community profile] dw_maintenance2025-10-25 08:42 am

Database maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

rydra_wong: Grasshopper mouse stands on its hind legs to howl. (turn venom into painkillers)
rydra_wong ([personal profile] rydra_wong) wrote2025-10-25 11:33 am

UK people: Scrap The Bathroom Ban

https://actionnetwork.org/letters/scrap-the-bathroom-ban

From TransActual and Trans+ Solidarity Alliance. Produces a template letter to your MP which you can customize as much as you can or want to.

Article by Jane Fae of TransActual (who have been absolutely kicking ass):

https://www.scenemag.co.uk/jane-fae-a-director-of-transactual-writes-on-the-eve-of-launching-a-new-campaign-to-get-mps-to-reject-the-ehrcs-bathroom-ban/

There are now a bunch of Labour MPs who are worried and making noises at the government, even if it's only about the impact on businesses of rules which are possibly illegal and impossible to follow without getting sued:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/oct/23/dozens-of-labour-mps-warn-of-chaos-for-firms-over-gender-recognition-advice

It's alleged that Bridget Phillipson was sitting on the guidance because she was worried it'd scupper her bid for the deputy leadership, whereas Powell is actively trans-friendly and has called for MPs to have a chance to debate and vote on the guidance.

The below may be an overly optimistic view but it seems clear there's tension and conflict between the EHRC and government:

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/frightened-and-desperate-ehrc-anti (warning for Substack, in case you are boycotting it)

So this is a moment when leverage is possible, and letters to your MP may actually do something.
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
rydra_wong ([personal profile] rydra_wong) wrote2025-10-22 06:08 pm

Anyway here is a cool person I didn't know about before

https://bsky.app/profile/luketurner.bsky.social/post/3m35pa3ywek2h



[Image description: Bluesky post by Luke Turner reading "here is a pleasingly anti-fascist animal painted on the Hurricane of gay RAF pilot Ian Gleed", above a picture of Gleed in the cockpit of his plane pointing to the image on its side of a cartoon cat swatting at and destroying a swastika.]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ian_Gleed (he may have been the fastest RAF pilot to ever make ace, in two days; he was only 26 when he was killed)

Further research by [personal profile] robynbender established that he actually had said antifascist cat painted on all his planes:

http://www.hatfield-herts.co.uk/aviation/gleed.html
alierak: (Default)
alierak ([personal profile] alierak) wrote in [site community profile] dw_maintenance2025-10-20 10:11 am

AWS outage

DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.
rydra_wong: Lee Miller photo showing two women wearing metal fire masks in England during WWII. (Default)
rydra_wong ([personal profile] rydra_wong) wrote2025-10-20 09:37 am

I now have basically no internet or phone reception at home

Except very occasionally if I can locate a spot that currently has reception.

So while that's going on, replies to anything may be delayed, but I'm reading when I can and distractions are still very much appreciated.

ETA: may now be fixed, I am deep in spoon debt and would like to be allowed to falldowngoboomnow.