But then, I strongly feel that when it comes to it, Otherkin don't really have that much room to talk about fic'kin, and furries don't really have that much room to talk about Otherkin. When it comes down to it, it's all variations on "I see something of myself/something that clicks with me/something that feels right to me in X, and that helps me make sense of myself better", spiritual stuff aside. At least, I think the main thing that makes it work for people is "I see something of me reflected in this and that's helped me with my life", as opposed to any woo-woo theories on where it all comes from. And I don't think that's strange, even if people have gone and distorted it in the worst possible way by running around shouting "omg u gaiz these ppl think their REALLY FICTIONAL CHARACTERS OH NOES". IMHO, they're the immature ones, not the people who get it and actually find it useful.

I posted this comment on a friend's journal a little while back, and after doing so got permission to repost it here, as I thought it touched on a side of the experience of alternate identity that hasn't been touched on much before. Not other/fiction as simple metaphor ("I'm like a dragon because I hoard stuff and like shiny things"), nor as a physical/metaphysical reality ("I'm a dragon because in a past life I was a dragon/I have a dragon's soul"), but something trickier to grasp, in parts allegorical but also more significant, more central than a metaphor: I am a dragon because when I look at the idea of dragon, something very core about it clicks with me and reminds me of me.

I feel like whatever else you say about it, whether you believe there's an additional explanation... that's the heart of it, for a lot of people. That's the level on which they click with the concept. Or at least, that's what seems to make sense of the idea for me.

Thoughts?


(Also, anyone notice that LJ seems to have brought back the Deleted Username Strikethrough, replacing the Boldface that followed in the wake of LJ's mass questionable-journals-deleting spree? Interesting, kinda....)

Well, guys. It's been forever. Ten weeks is a small eternity in Internet Time, yes? Somehow I... just fell out of the habit, I dunno. Long stories, longer trails of thought and consequence stemming off from those. But eventually I felt I needed to fight past the waves of guilt-over-not-posting I felt every time I logged into LJ (yes, I've been reading my flist daily) and actually say something. This's happened before, but I do care about LJ, and this time I don't plan to let the guilt win completely.

Odd that what prompted this was an ending. Not too long ago, I was having a chat with Nall, and he mentioned he'd been playing Kirby Super Star on the original SNES. Since we only have one copy in the house, I knew he'd used mine. We talked about 100% saves for a moment, and I told him I had one... he said he didn't see it.

It's the first time one of my carts has ever lost a save through age, though I knew ten years ago that such things happened. Somehow, my saves never died. Year after year, they mysteriously evaded this supposedly inevitable entropy. Like teenagers who think themselves immortal after cheating death, I never really imagined the data would be lost.

I can make that save again; probably a hundred times over, now. Computers, meanwhile, will preserve these games, and their saves, in a much more durable format; emulate and you need never lose your games. But there's something wistful, something poignantly end-of-an-era-ish, about knowing that this generation of cartridges is crumbling into obsolescence. Touching, like watching yesterday's newspapers rot away; only you had more emotional investment in those years of games than you ever had in the fleeting, gossipy headlines.

I sort of wanted to observe that.

So a petition went up recently on the 10 Downing Street website, associated with a site called Stop The Nightmares. (You can Google those things if you're looking for it: I was going to post the link, but now that I've thought about it more, I don't want to encourage people to impulse-click.) I feel very strongly about what it's petitioning against: the religious abuse of children by instilling hellfire and damnation teachings into them from an early age, of schools and religious institutions scaring children into accepting their beliefs by telling graphic stories of what kind of torture awaits them if they don't believe. Specifically, they want to instate laws that will forbid this kind of speech in scenarios such as schools and street preaching.

I think hellfire preaching is destructive and horrible, that it harms people (especially children, but I don't think adults are immune) psychologically, and that all of religion, including Christianity, could benefit from dropping the topic of hell. (Even if you believe in it. You want people to worship God because he's wonderful and loving, right, and to dwell on positive thoughts of him, not to only cling to religion out of fear? I know many Christians think believing out of fear of hell isn't good enough; then why not just avoid talking about hell? Either way those who were influenced only by the hell sermons are damned, so why not just spare everyone the trauma?) You don't have to ban religious schools or compromise their teachings to say "don't terrify children. Present this material in an age-appropriate context, or better yet, let children grow up and discover for themselves what the Bible says once they're old enough to be curious." I think that's reasonable to ask. So I signed the petition, because as I said, I do feel strongly about it.

But then I thought, wait. I'm really in favour of people not doing this. But am I in favour of a law against people doing this? Is that really the right way to go? On the one hand, it might serve as a catalyst for social change; if enough people frown upon this socially, then over time the behaviour might become unacceptable, and a law is a fairly good way to make sure that something is frowned upon socially. But on the other, do we really need more legislation? Would this law just be misused and misinterpreted? Will the people who really care about instilling their violent and hateful doctrine into the minds of the next generation just find ways to get around it, leaving only those caught in unfortunate misunderstandings to suffer? And with laws leading to punishment for those who break them, is it really right to bring more punishment into society?

Well, of course, I should have thought about that beforehand. But I suppose a thought provoked is still a better thing to happen late than never. I still don't know what the right option is: it feels wrong to allow people to hurt children this way yet wrong to use legislation to do that, and I think a lot of people do assume that feeling something should not be done is equivalent to supporting laws against it, because it doesn't seem like we have any other methods to keep people from causing harm. But maybe we do. Maybe there are other ways, like government campaigns, getting the message out into communities, making people think about the topic without pushing laws. I don't know, and I think I have to think about it.

So, a friend of mine just came up with a really interesting and, I think, quite lovely way of interpreting the whole concept of furry (and perhaps, to some extent, Otherkin, for those who see the idea more as a metaphorical expression of self than a literal reality). Xe isn't furry-identified per se, but does have some non-human characters/personas. I got permission to paraphrase/talk about it here, and I thought those of you on my friendslist who identify with the concept might appreciate it.

Basically, we were talking about how xe is fond of fantastical creatures because their physical forms are usually very strongly expressive of what they are on the inside (e.g. an ice creature looking very icelike), and because they're usually such magnificent, intelligent, magical, etc. creatures on the inside, the fact that their physical forms are able to express that is a really compelling thing. And then xe mentioned that xe thinks that's one thing that's really nice about people who have "personal characters" or furry avatars. Xe's a very spiritual person, and xe's take on life is that on the inside, we're all incomprehensibly beautiful creatures. And xe says that xe thinks a furry/mythical avatar is one way to take some of the beauty that's inside all people, and wear it, in some context, on the outside, by crafting a self-image that displays something of the person through metaphorical imagery that we associate with those traits and also find really pleasing to look at. While a lot of people would accuse people with overly pretty or elaborate avatars of exercising wish-fulfilment, xe argued that there's nothing we could create externally that even comes close to matching the beauty we have on the inside; so, far from trying to play to modesty and create humble avatars, we're all selling ourselves short no matter how beautiful our personas.

And I thought that was a really awesome way to look at furry, basically. That it's a way of making the beautiful complexities on the inside show on the outside. (See also today's Theri There comic.)

...it is really past 9pm over here? The sky is still blue. Not even sunset-coloured, really.

It feels like it's literally just got this way all at once; that it's gone from being dark at 6pm or so to not even being dark at 9. It hasn't, but it feels like it has. I'm so used to daylight hours being short; it seems I never quite internalise the summer. I dimly remember when I was young how it wouldn't get dark until 10 or so, and it would seem really strange, and I still don't think I've come to terms with the fact that it does that. I feel like my body clock suddenly did a radical shift; it feels almost physical, like when you're staring out the window of a moving vehicle and then all at once you realise it isn't the vehicle you're in that's moving, it's the vehicles outside, and your sense of what's going on is suddenly jerked around.

Nice, though.

"Describe your perfect sandwich, layer by layer.", says LJ. Okay, then. This I can do.

Take one slice of (preferably brown) bread. Spread one side fairly lightly with a vaguely butter-like condiment that is not strictly butter. But none of that weird olive oil stuff. Plain margarine will do. Then, dust the spread surface liberally with grated cheese. Cheddar is ideal, or another hard cheese of similar variety; Brie does not go in a sandwich. Optionally, add onions. Then prepare another slice of bread with margarine in the same or similar manner to the first. Place, spread side down, on first slice. Cut in half. Marvel at its simplistic, unadorned beauty and perfect balance of flavours. Eat.

Do not at any stage in this process add mayonnaise, for it is an abomination. Do not add gratuitous salad. Do not defile the sandwich, but respect its holiness and purity. Amen.

(Yes, this has been my favourite food since I think I was... one year old, when I miraculously discovered at a friend's birthday party the wonders of cheese. I'm slightly obsessed... and also off to get a sandwich.)

Why do I hear wind chimes and the sounds of phones vibrating when none of us have phones that vibrate in that particular pattern, or seemed to be going off? I swear this house has some kind of magical aura surrounding it; I hear the strangest noises at the strangest times of day. Weird bells at 5am, people apparently playing the piano (long after Nall has gone to bed) and singing at times in the morning when no person would be rehearsing for anything... Not that I'm complaining; it doesn't generally keep me awake, and is really rather nice. It's just baffling.

Is that special someone in your life needing a little protection? Needing an extra boost to get them through a tough time? Or maybe you just want to make someone feel like nothing in the world can stop them now. If so, and you're feeling in the mood for gratuitous random (or calendar-specific) gift-giving, I'd like to suggest one of these. Seriously. How. Awesome.

This also makes me ded from happy.

Also, bearded dragon chin is spiny!

This is so me, and I didn't even know it until I read the article (or at least couldn't have put it into those words). Setting makes a big impact on me in fiction, and makes a huge difference regarding whether I'll even enjoy a particular work. I'll be drawn to or violently avoid stories based on whether their setting appeals, and some of my best-loved fictions became that way almost solely based on their setting (e.g. Secret of Mana). I think part of it for me is that ever since I was young, I've had the unshakeable feeling that I'm Looking For Someplace, and fictions that tap into elements of That Place will become fast favourites because they help me feel closer to this nebulous thing that I'm searching for, and because I think that if I collect enough strands of the concept, someday I'll be able to assemble a complete enough picture of what I'm looking for that I'll know what it actually is. But equally, my revulsions towards certain settings feel just as intense; and they don't seem to be related to any particular experiences I can remember. I can't exactly explain it, but I know it matters a lot to me when I engage with fiction.

I can't even coherently describe the settings that will do this for me and the settings that won't. There are some "generic fantasy" stories that I absolutely adore the setting of, and others that seem completely banal. It can really turn on a few descriptive words, a particular narrative thread, whatever the author does to impart a sense of place. It's the reason I can never reliably tell whether I'll like a story just from people's descriptions of the characters and plot, and why I'm almost always surprised by the things I end up falling for (or loathing): a lot of it hangs on such a difficult-to-pin-down aspect of the fiction. It's also why I love worldbuilding, and was a huge fan of the sites that people commonly made in the early 00's to describe their sprawling fantasy worlds; often I don't need a plot or a set of characters to care about a place, and sometimes I'm even happier without (though I do value character attachments dearly, and if character attachment is strong enough I can love a fiction without loving its world. It's best when they correlate, though - which they rarely do, even in my most beloved fandoms).

If I ever do get around to authoring that "little snippets of videogames that deeply appeal to me" blog, it'll be largely about placefeel, I think.


*Not of the sexual kind; link is completely SFW. "Kink" = a general term often used in fandom to describe "thing that really grabs move/moves me/pushes my emotional buttons in fiction". There's no other succinct word for it, currently.

Not sure how much good it'll do in the mostly sane and liberal blogosphere of my friendslist, but this still deserves as much publicity as possible, so pass it around. If nothing else, it contains some beautiful lines that will no doubt touch anyone who's truly loved a videogame, and while focusing on an appreciation of the vast array of non-violent games out there, also makes a blindingly sensible case against those who cry out against violent games but ignore that many of our culture's best-loved literary treasures, as well as modern movies acclaimed for representing the realities of various walks of life, could not have done their job artistically without portraying violence.

This post from the department of Corin Is Still Alive, And Nico Nico Douga Still Own My Soul.

No, I don't really know what it's about (if it's about anything). I honestly think I'm better off that way.

(Also, this has pretty awesome music that makes me think of Paranoia Agent, even if it is a slideshow about Luca Blight being disturbing.)

...omg. I used to do this. I so used to do things like this all the damn time. (Except I didn't actually have a real videogame club, so I just pretended I did and wrote in notebooks anyway. Also, I would have never written "loose" for "lose". But yeah.) This hit me so hard with nostalgia that I just sort of crumpled up inside and actually forgot to breathe for a moment. The colourful little pictures and symbols next to the game names, the bad attempts at replicating videogame logos with my own hand-drawing, the mixing of cheats, commentary and stats obviously ripped straight from videogames magazines with cheerful abandon... it's all the same.

I would scan the one of these I actually do still have around, but they were also riddled with a great deal of... I don't know what you'd call it, exactly. Kid politics? Thinly-veiled attacks on rival clubs (where by "clubs" I meant "the two girls who always hung out together who I characterised as the personifications of Satan and all his devils, simultaneously*, when I was a kid")? So it's all a bit embarrassing. But I'll see if there's anything I can scan that doesn't actually make me shrivel up and go red from fail.

*...reading through this stuff, I'm not actually exaggerating one bit. The phrase "spawn of Kefka" was actually used at one point, which I'm assuming I considered to be roughly equivalent at the time.

Does anyone out there have a copy of the Suikoden V English walkthrough that has this image in it, and ability to scan at high quality? I know seika has both, but I know she also won't have access to either scanner or book for a while. The book doesn't need to be significantly bent in order for you to scan it; I don't need a complete, flat image, just parts. If anyone out there is willing to do some scans, let me know, and I'll fill you in on the details.

This niggles me on a couple of levels. For one, the "people should be educated about the Holocaust by watching and reading things instead" quote. Just... ehh. I understand the desire of Holocaust survivors not to see what they went through made into entertainment, but dammit, entertainment is not the only point of videogames. Just because they're called "games" doesn't mean they don't have the potential to be anything else. They're a medium, just like movies or books. (And it seems pretty clear to me from those screenshots that reading about the Holocaust is an aspect of the game.) Movies are frequently thought of as "entertainment", but I don't think (correct me if I'm wrong) that Schindler's List was seen as exploitative, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't seen as creating entertainment out of tragedy. It was meant to be a serious movie. There can be serious videogames. I don't blame the guy quoted for this, really; I blame the ignorance and perpetuation of stereotypes that surrounds gaming in general. Still, it's sad.

And the other quote that got to me: "Not to mention I find it incredibly hard to stomach that a game educating people about the events of the Holocaust is under fire, when there are so many games glorifying the violent aspects of the war." Nothing more to add to that, basically, than a big fat amen. If producers are getting shot down every time they try to make a thoughtful game about war yet are allowed to glorify mass killing as much as they please, something is seriously wrong. I know that's a simplification of the case - there've been a number of games made recently which have focused on the horrors and negatives of war as opposed to glorifying it - but it's still an unfortunate bias that we need to address.


Speaking of videogames involving treatments of war (because there's a time when I'm ever not, right?)... if this is what I think it is, then o. m. g. That link had trouble loading in my browser (it's a PDF, and it keeps being crashy for some reason; I'll have to download it and open it outside my browser, which I haven't done yet, but I will be doing), but it claims to be someone's thesis on the geography of the Suikoden world. Should be essential reading for a good slice of you out there, and I know I'm going to sit down with it as soon as I've finished clearing the thoughts from my head into LJ.

Also, random thing: for a while I've been dithering about whether to watch the ~60 stars ending for Suikoden V on YouTube. Factors involved in my dithering include:

+ I do want to see all the endings, in general.
+ NEED MOAR SUIKODEN.
+ I'm a hapless sucker who seems to have some masochistic need to tearjerk myself more over this game. It's therapy, or something.
+ I'll probably never actually have the heart to do a miserable, defeatist ~60-star playthrough of a 60-hour-plus game just to see a painful Bad Ending. I'm not that much of a masochist.

- It's on YouTube, therefore it'll be cruddy quality compared to actually seeing it on a TV.
- It'll probably be painful and sad and I won't like it. (Yes, this contradicts point #3 above. I didn't say my masochism was consistent.)
- It might just suck, not in the ouchy way but in the "meh, that was just generally not worth it" way, and then I'll be disappointed.

So... how worth seeing is it, actually? How awful is it? And should I watch it on YouTube or attempt to play through the game again (not like I'm doing a Bad End playthrough any time soon) or just not see it at all and write myself some fanfic about the Prince and his happy family sitting around playing Mornington Crescent How The Crap Do You Get Out Of Sol-Falena Anyway* on a sugar high? THE VOTE IS YOURS.

*It's like Mornington Crescent, except no move which puts you within three stops of the exit to Sol-Falena is legal for at least thirty turns.

So a random thing I've noticed about myself: when it comes to fiction, I'm a big fan of symbols. Not in the "oooo, this giant creature with its arms splayed out perpendicular to its torso is clearly a metaphor for Christ on the cross!/the tattered rose is clearly a symbol of innocent love turned bittersweet!" sort of way, but in the sense of fictional logos, emblems, sigils, crests. I think it's the fact that they're like a sort of code, a secret handshake, an inside reference; nobody except a fan of the fiction would know what they meant, yet they're an instant signifier to a fan that you know the work and identify with this particular aspect of it. Taking that idea further, they're like tribal symbols, perhaps, indicators of belonging. They're a less crude, more stylish way of sporting a "Go Team!" slogan, but at the same time, they're something else, something almost mystical; the essence of something valued distilled into a few lines or a simple, iconic image. They're compressed ideas, concentrated, encapsulated, and that makes them powerful.

I always end up wanting my favourite characters, my favourite concepts and ideas and parts of my fandoms, to have representative symbols. I'd want to wear them as pendants or pins, some kind of jewellery, to represent my love for them, and they'd be something known well enough within the fandom that anyone who saw said ornament and shared my connection would instantly know that we had a bond. There are t-shirts and other such items of merchandise, yes, but there's something powerful and almost religious-seeming about a pendant that I like. T-shirts seem to say, "This is my fandom"; something that looks more like jewellery seems to say, "This is a devotion for me; this is a big part of my life".

Idle musings, yes. I'm endeavouring to ramble more on Stuff That Is Of Pertinence To Me, whether or not it's really a discussion-worthy topic or a novel idea. My simple thoughts, my feelings, my inclinations, have a place here too.

Just a little meme/exercise I thought'd be fun, and might potentially lead to some interesting discussions. (I feel bad for posting this while you're away, seika; I'm just really in a chatting-about-fiction mood right now and could do with a meme. Feel free to respond when you're back! I like not to put time-limits on discussions here.)

The idea is simple: pick a character (or three, or five, or $VARIABLE) we both know, and tell me one or more facts about them from your personal canon (i.e. something that wasn't in the story but is personal to your interpretation). I'll respond with one or more facts about the same character from my own personal canon. I reserve the right to tangent off into Fun Facts About My Connection To This Character, to substitute Georg Prime Facts™ for actual facts about Georg, or to not be able to answer (especially if you pick a fandom I haven't thought about much), but I'll try and pass commentary on your fact(s), at the very least.

Oh, and if you want to ask something about a character you know I know but you don't have anything to say about them yourself, feel free! I'm playing fast and loose with this one, sorta. I just want us to talk nerdy at each other. <3

So I think this is a realisation that may have hit me before, and I may even have put into words before now, but regardless, in the moment it felt really quite revelatory. (Apparently Neil Gaiman has this happen all the time. Suddenly hits on the idea for THE BEST ENDING EVAR... then looks through his old notes and finds he'd thought it was THE BEST ENDING EVAR in his rough drafts several months ago, too. At least I'm in prestigious company.)

Anyway, talking to bossgoji just now, I think I've hit on a personal weakness I have when it comes to fictional characters. ( I have a soft spot for good-guy traitors, and I think this is why. Cut for Suikoden V and Lunar: Eternal Blue spoilers. Also, there is discussion of FF6 that's not really spoilery because, c'mon, it's the first thing you learn about Celes. Oh, and did I mention long essay is long? )

Someone's put together a Suikoden III manga moodtheme, for anyone looking to change theirs. I'm just slightly too attached to my Lunar moodtheme to change it (even if Lunar's not my primary fandom any more), but this is well done none the less, and I thought it worth the link.

Also, I've mentioned the existence of these to a couple of people before, but the embodiment of win apparently named Haswar2 has posted up most of the Japanese cutscenes from Suikoden V on YouTube. The voiceover still has its rough spots, but if you disliked the English dub, or just want to get a different perspective on what some of the characters might have sounded like, these are worth watching. Also, bear witness to the brilliance that is Euram's absolutely perfect overdramatic-narcissist-bishie voice, and... cringe slightly at the fact that the very literal katakanization* for "Lucretia" doesn't take into account that it's actually a name with an existing pronunciation, one that can in fact be transcribed into katakana (ru-ku-rii-sha, most likely). /dork, but come on, literally saying it "Lu-cre-ti-a" just sounds weird. XP

*possibly not actually a word


Been pondering doing that thing I was thinking a while ago, of putting up a blog just for observations on tiny elements of games (the background music in a particular level, the glint of light off a certain structure, etc.) that have just made me squee or otherwise stuck in my mind. Or maybe I'll just create a post series here for it. Either way, the idea still is in my mind, I just... haven't got around to it yet. XP

You know, ever since hearing about them I'd always wondered if World 9 in the Lost Levels was real or a myth. I knew the Minus World in the original SMB was real, for certain definitions of "real" (it's not actually programmed into the game, more of an interesting glitch that happens when a pointer redirects you somewhere that doesn't exist), but I'd never actually seen any evidence of the mythical World 9, only reachable when you complete the entire game without warps. (I've never even finished the game; I repeatedly got stuck on 8-4, so I've never been able to do this myself.)

Anyway... it turns out they really do exist, along with some other interesting things I didn't know about. (I know it is bizarre to be saying this, but there are spoilers for the Lost Levels behind that link. If you intend to play the levels, whether by savestate or hack or whatever, don't go look at that link; it's an illustrated guide, and the levels look really nifty, and it'll spoil it for you.) The guide in itself is very nostalgia-provoking; it's all laid out with panoramic strip-screenshots of the levels, the way some of the old SMB guides I had used to. And... yeah. It's just weird and kind of nostalgic in general, just knowing something concrete about one of the things I always wondered in childhood.