Falling into the abyss

So everything's bad and I'm currently temporarily out of work due to the government shutdown. So, later today I'll be putting out applications to jobs that I hope will be okay with me high-tailing it back to my real career once it's over. Speaker of the House keeps saying that it's going to be the longest shutdown ever and I need money for the mortgage. Frankly, I'm not sure what I'd be qualified for. I've been a glorified park ranger for nearly 20 years, all I know is weird administrative stuff for systems decades out of date also, how to beg Congress for money just right. This one budgeting software still comes on floppy disks and requires DOS knowhow to use.

I might consider opening commissions, but I've been out of practice for ages and we've got AI now to generate shitty art.

As an aside, SE put out info on the new Dissidia on mobile with clear indicators of microtransactions mentioned in the closed beta application. So, another attempt at a gacha. Not sure how much interest it'll garner, as coffee shop AUs written by tweens on ff.net/Wattpad rarely go over well and the new Dissidia has big coffee shop AU energy all over it. Art is mediocre and everything about it looks dull, which is disappointing because it's nice to see Krile get some attention for once.

Oh well.

Ugh, I don't really want to be doing this, but it's not like either of us is wealthy.

There's this young transmasc dude who started following me around like a duckling imprinted on the wrong person (figuratively, of course), because I guess I was the only adult in his life with their act together. Because of his history of physical and emotional abuse, I've been helping him about as much as I can. Taught him to drive, trying to help him get out of the psychological mire left by a severely ableist family, generally trying to move him towards a healthier adulthood.

Problem is, he started developing chronic illness issues before we met offline, but they've really come roaring in now. Among those is unusual hand blisters and shredding skin that make his physical labor job painful. Because of his growing chronic illness issues, he's been missing a lot of work and can barely survive on what he makes.

So we're both asking for help in paying off his medical debts. Hopefully enough help to pay those debts off and send him to a city where he can find an office job that's kinder on him. I don't make enough to help him more than I have already (which averages out to just shy of a thousand dollars by now); I am trying to get hearing aids and that's expensive, my rent increased by a lot, and then there's the whole bit where I'm getting married later in the year and my wife-to-be will have to deal with being squeezed into a tiny cabin in the woods.

Anyway, here's the tumblr post I made, and here's his twitter followup. Donations can go to ko-fi or cashapp.

I really wish I knew how else to help him.

Due to Tumblr/Wordpress' parent company just selling user data to Midjourney and OpenAI for generative AI training, I'll be moving a lot of my old writing and stuff here. Not sure if I want to do postdated posts that no one will ever see on their feeds, or just group a bunch of related writing together into single omnibus posts (ex: the Twig-is-a-mom side bits from Beta AU, or all my majorly disjointed bits for Dragondance).

Going to move my photos to syldra.net, too. Will have to create some sort of personal page, and I haven't really done HTML/CSS in whole years. Making my own graphics is right out, too, as Photoshop is on my desktop computer, which is mothballed because of the insufficient electrical load in the cabin.

Is there a good FTP app for Android that isn't full of ads? My tablet hotspot has a data limit, but I wouldn't hit that limit if I uploaded things straight from my tablet.

I ended up getting derailed on daily postings for Femslash February on account of work. I'm still going to finish the prompts, I just feel kind of bad for not being able to keep up.

Disjointed because my back is aching in advance of having to shovel all this snow tomorrow. Sorry.

* I find that I really want to talk about my magnum opus fic (the F/L megafic) and all the background work that goes into it, but a) it involves a ship not a lot of people like/are grossed out by, b) tiny fandom is tiny. I think I just miss the interaction I got with Digimon and SU fandoms. Or at least, I didn't feel like haters were vagueposting about me for the sin of not doing fandom right.
--- Because I have an anthropologist background and my dad was an archaeologist and I grew up in a multiethnic/multicultural household, I just can't do monocultures the way jRPGs like to do. Like, just a few hours ago I started doing calculations for a lunisolar/astronomical calendar vs the solar/arithmetical calendar just so I can have dates right. (I did this for SU, too. I based the alien calendar on Maya math-based/cyclical calendar. My ancestry is a Maya offshoot, I'm allowed.)
( I am problematic and unfazed by a lot )
------- I have not yet gone down the hole of figuring out planet size and how that and two moons (Legend of the Crystals) would affect orbits and how long a year is. That kind of deep nerdery I'll keep for original stuff.

* Started writing short ficlets to Femslash February prompts. That's being collected here. Warning: all Faris/Lenna.

* Oh hey, reminder to self: DFFOO short stories.

* ( Elfquest talk, cut for spoilers and the problem of Timmain/Skywise )

Anyway, I should go to bed. Got telework and driveway shoveling in the morning.

P.S. As an aside, talk of Elfquest getting a cartoon adaptation reminds me every now and then about failed attempts to adapt Pern. It's a good time for it! Dragons, politics, sexytimes, deadly fungus falling from the sky. But the rights are in the court of Anne's children, and they're not very good at continuing the universe. Todd's main character Kindan is a Mary Sue to such an extent as to put all others to shame. Gigi's Dragon's Code is just Dragondrums but boring.

Okay so look, I work 10 hour days with an extra hour of driving. The nearest grocery store is 2 hours away so I have to cook at home, and that's a huge involved thing. I don't have time for anything else these days.

This is the first thing I've drawn in... wow, nearly two years, and only because my work program for a huge chunk of what I do has been behaving so horribly that I had a couple of stretches of not having a lot to do. Faris/Lenna. It's been my otp since the 1990s, I'm not about to stop now.

So DFFOO is shuttering, both GL and JP versions. I kinda expected this (given Mobius and Record Keeper), but it's real annoying anyway. At least SE plans on releasing videos of scenes we won't get anymore.

But, damn, and I was finally starting to make progress in Shinryuu-level fights. And I actually liked DFFOO! Could not bring myself to care about anyone in FFBE except Fina.

Anyway, hi, how do I rip the cute little stickers from the game, and the voices?

(As an aside, I know I should be posting about real life more, but I'm so burned out lately that I expend what energy I do have on fic)

Title: A Thing Appointed to Desolation
Words: 3033
Summary: The ship has a sprite that few sailors will ever see, for seeing that sprite spells doom for the ship. Faris has the bad fortune of meeting him on the way to the Ship's Graveyard.

This was originally conceived as part of An Altered Course, but I ended up taking it out as it would distract from the main fic. It can and probably should be as its own thing. I tinkered with it on and off over the years since and finally got around to posting it.

Hello old friend, it's time for AJ to have emotions over a space station.

I preordered the new Babylon 5 animated movie, The Road Home, on bluray. Amazon told me that I wouldn't get it until next week, which was frustrating because JMS has been talking about it on twitter and I hadn't wanted to spoil myself. I checked the tracking earlier today, realized that it arrived way faster than expected, and told my supervisor that I was braindead after 3 months of back-to-back inspections for 6 hours a day/5 days a week and needed to go home early (this is true, and by the time I clocked out I'd been staring blankly at my paperwork for 15 minutes).

Overall? Some stylistic choices bug me (the pelvises are so short! everyone looks like they're all yanking low-rise jeans up as high as they can) and nothing is really mindblowing story-wise like some major story arcs in the original show, but it was just... cosy, like coming back to a much-loved place. The gang's all here, in spirit if not in life, and I think that the VAs who stepped into the roles of actors who went beyond the Rim did well.

So anyway I need a station icon, because even 20+ years later I love that 2,500,000 tons of spinning CGI metal. (For those new to me, B5 did what very few shows managed to do and made the station feel like a character in its own right, and I am not ashamed to say that Babylon 5 is my favorite character.)

Spoilers behind cut.
( Long after we are gone, our voices will linger in these walls for as long as this place remains )

Just short things because I'm fighting an infection and it sucks:

Games:
- Finished FF13. Finally. Enjoyed it, but not enough to go back to do sidequests and shit after the main storyline was over.
- Attempted 13-2 and Steam kept throwing fits enough that it's barely playable, even after updating drivers. Right now the issue is that there's sound during the cinematic sequences, but absolutely nothing during regular play. Not sure what's going on.
- While I do have FFXV on my laptop due to using my mom's cable internet to buy a bunch of shit from Steam, I still...have no desire to play it, really. Any interest in it died early on, when trailers revealed it to be a sausagefest with few, if any major female characters. Sorry but it's the 2000s, we can do better than all-male casts.
- I'm getting the same sense of where are the fucking women from what's come out for FFXVI and despair. I'm sorry but I'm really, really tired of mass media centering on male characters (who are, 99% of the time, cisgender and heterosexual). So if I end up playing it at all, it'll be the same situation as with XV: I ignore it, my interest might be piqued by a female character's inclusion in DFFOO, I talk to my girlfriend and find out that the character isn't a major one, and ignore it again until opportunity arises for me to buy it cheap, download it on vacation, and leave it rotting on my hard drive.
- FF Origins looks...maybe interesting? But I don't care about Garland, and my reaction time is too sluggish for action games. Really am not a fan of this trend towards action games.
- I am interested in this. Lord knows when I'll be near a cable modem next, though.

Other:
- Mom was talking about going to Greece in a couple of years. As I took a course in Ancient Greek (as understood by scholars between 2000-2009), I figured it wouldn't be too hard to update to modern Greek and started on that in Duolingo. And yeah, the alphabet hasn't really changed that much over the centuries. What is interesting is the vowel shift, how diphthongs and consonant clusters changed in pronunciation, the loss of a bunch of accent marks, and just how much of the word variations (genders/numbers/cases/declensions/etc) streamlined. Don't think I'll be filling a college-ruled sheet with multiple columns just to write down every noun variant of a single word for modern Greek.
- I follow some sailing interest* blogs on twitter/tumblr and through them discovered this: Jubilee Sailing Trust, which basically takes people of various types of disabilities out to sea to be part of a crew for a bit. It sounds like a nice get-away from my usual job.
- I got a new tablet and downloaded a bunch of shows from Netflix while I was at my mom's house. Masters of the Universe was a nice homage to the original and I'm still laughing over the guys on youtube whining about it centering on Teela instead of He-Man when He-Man wasn't even in the title. Haven't finished new!Shaman King yet, but it's progressing about as expected. Wild that Shaman King remains the only shounen series I give a shit about, but I think it's just because Anna is a strong character in her own right and people listen to her.

And that's about it for now.



* My father doomed me to this by getting me into Pirates of Penzance when I was a kid, took me aboard a reproduction Santa Maria in 1992, and ever so often took me to see the Elissa. Also once made me a little wooden ship when I was about 6 and deep into Gulliver's Travels and Treasure Island. It wasn't very good, mind, but he tried.

This is the first part of Founding Fire, the Queen Karnak fic currently gnawing on my mind.

Bits feeding into this:

• In the books, there are implications that Queen Karnak might have been what Faris could have been had she never been lost. The same phrase (気性の激しい) has been used to describe both.
• Books again: The entire thing with the war 50 years before and the previous King Tycoon being a warmonger and extremely unlikely to be related to Alexander, but Alexander would have probably been very young during that war and didn't come into his throne until the previous king abdicated later. There were political shenanigans about and, despite the war happening, very little seems to have been done to the previous king.
• Careful, there is a reference to Habsburgs.
• Per the Ultimania book, the initial plan for Alexander was that he was a mercenary who became king because of his popularity and leadership abilities. There's a nod to that here; Queen Karnak doesn't like him playing mercenary when he should be learning to be a king.
• Also a nod: Roksanne/Enna Kros from World of Final Fantasy, just because she's a delight.
• I don't know where the bit about Queen Karnak being a linguist came from, other than some idea nagging at me, but I'm not personally a fan of monocultures in fiction so here it is. The trade language/lingua franca is Vulgate Lonkan--Zezae speaks it because Surgatese is a related language here. However, the trade language for the other world is Kuzan, from which Tycoonian developed a few thousand years back (and the language shift mentioned is modeled on Ancient Greek to Modern Greek just because I took Greek once).
• Apparently if you have a stutter like I do, you also stutter when using sign language. That sure was embarrassing to find out.

( of thy fire thou madest me, and like a true child of fire, I breathe it back to thee )