Some of my most cherished belongings: in 2005, I saw that Sly 3 had a demo at E3, and wrote a letter to Sucker Punch asking if they had any available. They sent this nice card back to me and promised to send a demo when they had copies. I don't remember what story questions I asked, but it was probably something about Sly's dad or the Clockwerk eggs if I had to guess.
And true to their word they did send the demo which I put untold hours into, which featured the original opening with Sly on the beach and some stuff that was changed for the final game. Sly has a different move instead of the charge attack, having little jabs that build up to the spin. Bentley is a lot stretchier in the demo (and in a "yeah I can see why you changed that" moment uses his legs as an attack as he spins his wheelchair around instead of the gadgets in the final game).
I'll always be grateful to Sucker Punch for this 馃挅
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A lovely festive card from a friend and random notes.
19|12|2023
I am back after being very ill again. This time I got the flu, and to make things worse my panic disorder kicked me once again and it was bad. I am starting to feel a bit better now, but I am still very weak and my stomach isn't at its best yet. I spent a couple of hellish days, and decided to skip class this week. I confident I will be fully recovered for Friday when I'll have to speak in the seminar, but until that day I am not leaving my house and I am taking things slowly. This of course means that my nice study plan is totally fucked. I am so beyond schedul and I am not in shape to get caught with it, so I will simply have to sit down and make a whole other plan. I am starting to slowly getting back into doing some work during the day, but I have not enough mental energy to power through the book I have to study. So this week I will try to stay productive as much as I can but minding what my body allows me to do. I will study less hours during the day, do lighter stuff, and stop whenever I feel like I need to lie down, or move around depending on what my body is asking me. This morning for example I got about an hourish of work done, I was very happy with myself but then I simply had to accept that I needed to lie down, and I did so. I am fighting with the guilt of not sticking to plans and feeling overwhelmed with everything I have to do, and I am trying my best. The other thing I am struggling with at the moment is food, not in a concerning way, but more in the sense that right now I feel like I lost the joy of eating and having a good meal and that is impacting my mood so bad. First a couple of weeks ago I went to the dentist and struggled so much with pain in my mouth for a while, and now due to my stomach being affected by the flu, eating has just become something I have to do and I despise feeling like this. I want to sit at my table and be happy about what I am going to eat, I want to look forward to my meals and I have yet to figure out how to get back there. Maybe I just have a bit of a scare since in the past two or three years I often had my anxiety and panic symptoms strongly linked to my stomach and I am now scared that I'll get back into that stupid place in which eating was anxiety inducing for me. I just hope that will get better soon and that I will be able to enjoy the amazing food my family will make during the holidays.
calm hobbit winter activities and productivity:
read first thing in the morning (I managed to read ten pages which is such a big win after these awful days)
wrote notes for the second chapeter of Nature, Human Nature and Human Difference by Justin Smith
updated my reading journal
started watching cabinet of curiosities (in the past few years I have been terrible at watching new series, but this morning when I had to lie down after studying I felt like watching something new could be a good way to keep my brain a bit active. I watched the first two episodes and loved the first one. The second one fell very flat for me but I am exctied to see more of it, it definitely has the gothic horror vibes I adore)
started reviewing my men theories and power practices notes and added a few additional informations here and there
practiced my presentation for Friday
馃摉: Bookshops and Bonedust by Travis Baldree
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yuna should use her rich girl privileges to spoil hikaru, i think.
taking hikaru out shopping with her, using her father's money to buy expensive perfumes for herself, very nice cologne for hikaru. a variety of different scents, each on their own outside of hikaru's price range, that she'd never be able to buy if she were out shopping by herself or with her parents -- but yuna covers the cost and buys them for her, just so that she has something nice. even makes sure that each of hikaru's new colognes matches up nicely with a perfume that yuna is either buying or already has on her dresser.
(hikaru is carrying all of the shopping bags, of course.)
buying high-end lipstick and 'testing' it with hikaru, later, in her room, with kisses -- lips or arm -- to see if it rubs off or smudges, and doing this with each new shade, just in case one could possibly be faulty.
regularly having hikaru over for the night and washing her hair with the same nice shampoo and conditioner that yuna uses to keep her own hair so sleek -- being especially thorough if hikaru's had a long day or is particularly dirty or sweaty. brushing and combing out any knots or tangles (and just a little bit of affectionately combing her fingers through it) to keep hikaru's hair in as good condition as her own.
having a rich girlfriend has benefits 馃惎
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Completely self indulgent post but here's one of the post-canon scenarios I have in my head for G Gundam.
Maybe skip this post if you don't like dark themes. Not all of what I've outlined is dark (most of it isn't), but I do cross the line past what appears in the show in regards to DG cells and abduction.
The shuffles all get roped into restoration projects on Earth between the 13th and 14th gundam fights, partially to have something to do alongside their training, partially out of inspiration by the common points of the Kasshus' and Master Asia's goals, and partially because netting their countries some decent publicity is likely to earn them favors during the Gundam Fight's off-years.
Sai is contacted by Kyral about an effort to clear out the infamous buildup of trash and cadavers on Everest; he wants Sai to leverage Neo China's help as something of a reparation kind of deal and Sai goes sure why not.
Sai recruits Argo because Bolt Gundam is built to withstand the cold, and he thinks Argo and Nastasha could help reverse engineer that quality to enable the use of their Gundams as both heavy work equipment and protection from the harsh environmental conditions that normally prevent this kind of operation.
George gets involved because someone he knows has a distant relative who died on the mountain a century ago, and they wanted him to check in with the forensics team on the project. This detail is important because eventually it becomes clear that there is a mystery to solve (that I myself haven't figured out all the details of yet but broadly know the setup and conclusion); DG-infected people are disappearing and not being investigated due to stigma. Our heroes are naturally going to be pissed about this, and will need an "in" with the field if they want to do anything about it.
First massively self-indulgent element: The forensics/body identification team inexplicably includes the real-world author Kathy Reichs, who somehow exists in this universe, and there's a little side bit about her having written a Bones book right before the 12th fight that featured a cooked cadaver found inside a gundam after entry into the Earth's atmosphere. There are a lot of weird coincidences in the book that parallel the DG incident, which creeps everyone out, but the similarities are merely born of the writer threading the needle of being believable and interesting in a way that became very true to life.
What does become relevant is when the Shuffles eventually meet up, she's able to explain the implications of a bunch of weird shit the fighters discovered (also Marie Louise read her book, and one of the in-universe liberties Reichs took writing about the gundams' black boxes that she explains in the afterword leads to ML realizing something important; that Neo Germany does not have its gundam's remains.)
While the Everest project is happening, Domon, Chibodee, and Allenby all want to continue their training somewhere on Earth, and receive a proposal from (an OC of mine who is) a historic preservationist (and an acquaintance of Allenby's): she has acquired the grounds of an abandoned castle in Europe* after submitting a plan to restore it, and needs to hire people to help with the labor.
*the castle is probably somewhere in Germany because I also want this pitch to have drama over Schwarz (pre-13th fight), Schwarz (Kyoji), and Schwarz (the next guy who was supposed to inherit the mask when the older ninja retired). Also Germany is fucking pretty.
In exchange for the help of the three gundam fighters, they and Rain get paid, plus room and board anywhere on the grounds, plus full access to the grounds and miles of sparsely-inhabited countryside for training purposes, and the privacy and ability to practice with their gundams that comes with being in the middle of fucking nowhere. Rain sets herself up to work a clinic in the next town over as well as practicing pro re nata wilderness medicine (I'm convinced every medic supporting the gundam fight would need to be able to do this.)
The group involved in the Castle project sticks around for a time, makes some good progress, and engage in occasional Shenanigans that come up when you put a bunch of weirdos in a Situation.
They aren't in town a lot save for Rain, but when they are they eventually start to pick up on gossip and news about the Mysterious Disappearances correlated with DG cell infection (as well as details that turn out to be important later). Eventually Rain brings this to Domon and Chibodees' attention and they decide that, yeah, this is tied to the DG, this is their problem, they should convene with the rest of the Shuffle Alliance about it.
Also of course Schwarz is involved because I'm the one writing this; the culprits' DG-tissue harvesting operation relies on having him captured and helpless, using cells from his body to "update" other victims' DG infections to a less aggressive strain. One thing I haven't decided is whether I want a reinstantiated Wong to head this shit, or make up my own morally bankrupt opportunistic asshole looking to twist the DG to their own benefits. I also need to decide where on the planet the center of all this insanity is, and it needs to be a place that isn't going to have any unfortunate implications (because that's a genuine risk with dark story elements)
... That's about as much as I have that is thought-out enough for me to explain. I return to thinking about this scenario a lot because it puts most of the characters way out of their element (and has a bunch of details that appeal to me specifically), and it kind of evolved into an incomplete plot outline that I don't currently have any plans to flesh out.
I think it's an interesting enough direction to go, because it follows through with a lot of the themes present in G, but takes advantage of the genre shift to avoid DBZ-crazy power scaling and adjusts the conflict more to a matter of where the main characters' prowess is most effective (Both in and out of the gundams. I'm assuming there are a ton of guys similar to Michelo's gang that just need fighting interspersed with everything else I described. In fact, kicking Some Group of Douchebags out of their protection racket is probably how team Castle even gets ahold of evidence related to missing persons.)
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Wild that anytime I post an update a lot of people read it and are even excited about it and have their own thoughts and reactions to it that I'll never know.
Comments are only the very tip of the iceberg with it. And I am Very grateful to commenters for letting me in on it. But in the same way that I'll be excited with my friends when a fic we love updates, it's likely that Other people enthuse with Their friends when my fic updates. And it's just so strange. An experience I'll never have access to.
Everyone's relationship with my fic is unique. So many different people with so many different circumstances and preferences... and the number of people that have told me that my fic is one of their favorites, some even saying it's their Favorite favorite... every single one of them have their own relationship with my writing.
It's just interesting to me. I think and think and think on my writing. I have my plans for basically the entire fic, the way I want it to end already thought out, all the major plot beats and the relationship progressions, All of that thought out. I love my writing so very much, but I'm on the inside looking out. This is my mechanical horse, and I'm in here laying out the groundwork and pulling levers and constructing limbs, puttering away making the horse move. Forever and always, my relationship with it will be more intimate than anyone's, and yet more clinical. Because I know it better than the back of my own hand, but I'll never have the experience of reading it fresh. Of reading it without knowing everything that's going to happen from now to the end and beyond. I won't have the thrill of the plot twists I have planned, the delight at seeing things progress, the horror at seeing things go wrong...
This is my mechanical horse, and I'm making it move.
I just always wonder what it must be like to see it from the outside. I hope to others that it's a pretty horse.
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