(no subject)

Saturday, June 14th, 2025 11:01 pm
gremdark: Neal Caffrey from White Collar making a joking face. (Neal jovial)
[personal profile] gremdark
Dreamwidth To-Do List
  • Jazz up this journal's style a bit (I've got a big hoard of tutorials at this point! Just need to play around with them!)
  • Learn how to embed a Spotify playlist (I've seen it done! Presumably you can find or generate an embed code somewhere.)
  • Put together an updated generic Dear Author letter for exchanges (I started working on this on Tumblr ages ago, but chronic illness fatigue kept me from finishing it for long enough that it's more practical to start a new draft)
  • Migrate my fanfiction reclists over from Tumblr (This will be an Undertaking, but I love having things backed up)
  • (Stretch goal, given the timeline) Finish and post my Summer of the 69 fill before the theme prompt changes.

Fanfic Rec: in the shadows by Kieron_ODuibhir

Saturday, June 14th, 2025 10:37 pm
gremdark: Barbara Gordon as Batgirl from Gotham Adventures. She's thinking hard, and looks frustrated. (Barbara thinking)
[personal profile] gremdark
I found this fic on Tumblr earlier, and it absolutely delights me.

In which Superman and the Justice League slowly come to the realization that Batman isn’t a real person, and Superman confronts him about it. The gimmick here is essentially that Bruce Wayne made Batman up, and now that Batman has outlived him, it’s up to him to figure out what to do with that. It’s tagged “a boy and his heroic nightmare entity”.

Read "in the shadows" on AO3 here. 12k, four chapters, complete.

As someone else put it in the tumblr notes, it's rare to see something new done with Batman. This is a refreshing take that nevertheless plays with many of the elements that make the character compelling.

Ongoing journal maintenance stuff... )

tresfoyle: a very large woman's face peering smugly and improbably from the confines of a lavish but normal-sized coach's window. She's dressed in lavish, dark furs and half-concealing her face behind a fan. It's taken from a scene from Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle adaptation. (Default)
[personal profile] tresfoyle
The dawn of spring’s end comes to Chrysoprase. Newly-minted men and women gather in the promenades to stand, be counted, and offer tithe as they pass under the shadow of the great plodding rarabim guard and the arks of tribute borne aloft on their ten-span sun-cracked shoulders. The tithe givers raise to their mouths handkerchiefs embroidered by their mothers for this day, that they might choose the weight of their offering privately; excisors bearing lambent spears and shields collect these tokens of their ripe youth and empty them into the arks, letting the wind carry the cloths where it may.

And as the day wears on, the arks pile high with obols, black and glistering under the daylight, each no larger than a thumbnail and twice as heavy as shame.

Read more... )

birth!

Saturday, June 14th, 2025 07:55 pm
gullwingdoors: artistic depiction of gull (gull)
[personal profile] gullwingdoors
daaaaay

got the hg psycho gundam mk ii... got good beer... eatin' up food... life is good

(no subject)

Saturday, June 14th, 2025 12:28 am
gremdark: A bush of blooming yellow roses, set against a blue sky (yellow roses)
[personal profile] gremdark
 I follow 1664 people on Tumblr, which polls I’ve seen go around would indicate is an unusually high number. It’s had a decade to accrue, and I see no reason to unfollow people who become inactive (though I do unfollow people who become annoying)

I’m quite enjoying the more active cultivation it takes to find people to interact with on here, and I’m striving to rise to the challenge. I’ve spent a lovely chunk of the evening listening to music and playing with the “random journal” button, then exploring reading pages when I run across someone whose taste seems similar to mine.

The general “comment before you subscribe” culture around here is unfamiliar but fun. I spend a lot of my time in internet fandom trying to convince others that unsolicited interactions are okay and even wanted, and it’s fun to run into a very different set of default social assumptions.
 

With that said, if there’s someone on here you’d think I’d vibe with, I’d love to hear about it in the comments! I’m getting plenty of mileage out of searching from my interests and checking out the people who comment in the communities I’m in, but human recs are unbeatable. Alternatively, who are your favorite people on here?

A perfect summary of online life in the 2020's

Friday, June 13th, 2025 06:43 pm
malymin: An image of Miho from Season Zero of Yu-Gi-Oh with hearts around her. (Miho)
[personal profile] malymin

I'm so sick of Discord servers, man.

tresfoyle: a very large woman's face peering smugly and improbably from the confines of a lavish but normal-sized coach's window. She's dressed in lavish, dark furs and half-concealing her face behind a fan. It's taken from a scene from Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle adaptation. (Default)
[personal profile] tresfoyle
I really do love it here. Dreamwidth is easily the least poisonous social media experience I've had in years and years, and I'm perennially grateful for the things it does and does not do.

mostly.

For all that I love dw structurally, because I think it has tremendous potential, I'm kind of shocked by how little that potential's actually been exploited. There are so many communities that would benefit from having a presence on here, from having a nice reliable spot to do their longform text-driven blogging, and yet the one interest group here that seems to maintain a substantial presence is fic writers.

Nothing against fic writers, to be clear. Your ways aren't my ways, but I know whose turf I'm on and I respect my neighbors. And obviously there are people using dw for other purposes—I follow a fair few of them, and I treasure what they do! But that's in no small part because it feels so rare to have that kind of encounter in the wild, so to speak.

New Crowdfunding Project: "Take Us North"

Friday, June 13th, 2025 04:12 pm
ysabetwordsmith: Cartoon of me in Wordsmith persona (Default)
[personal profile] ysabetwordsmith posting in [community profile] indie_games
A friend tipped me to this campaign: Take Us North is a video game about migrants trying to cross the border into the United States of America. If you're interested and jump fast, you may be able to catch the Early Bird reward in the first 24 hours at $25, after that it jumps to $35 minimum. I backed it because I want to project to exist -- tell ALL the stories, and poke a bigot in the eye!

Take Us North description
A narrative adventure/survival game that follows the journeys of migrants and asylum seekers on their way to cross the US-Mexico border

$6,056 pledged of $30,000 goal
95 backers
29 days to go

🎮 [Early Bird] Take Us North!
$25
Backers 52
Estimated delivery Dec 2026
🚨FIRST 24 HOURS DISCOUNT!🚨 Receive a digital copy of Take Us North (PC/Steam) and digital wallpapers!
3 items included
Digital Copy of the Game Quantity: 1
High-Resolution Digital Wallpapers Quantity: 1
Invitation to Virtual Community Launch Party Quantity: 1

Read more... )

MS Paint World: Rain at Crystal Lake

Friday, June 13th, 2025 04:48 pm
tepidsnake: (Default)
[personal profile] tepidsnake


It's a two-fer this time, as we have Rainy Day Roll from Mega Man Powered Up and Koume Shirasaka from THE iDOLM@STER: CINDERELLA GIRLS doing her traditional Jason Voorhees outfit for Friday the 13th! I drew these real close together, so it's OK to pair them up, right? The Rainy Day outfit is absolutely adorable (it's just as cute as the witch costume in the same game, maybe even more so) and, well, it's Friday the 13th today, and it's a silly tradition of mine to draw Koume cosplaying as Jason. This time, she's using his Multiversus design, although maybe that jacket's a little too big...

So we watched Andor Season 1.

Friday, June 13th, 2025 09:02 am
gullwingdoors: Artistic depiction of Quail. (Quail)
[personal profile] gullwingdoors
Holy shit. This is television. This is television for real.

Aside from the Everything Else here... we love just how much attention it pays to making the galaxy feel lived in. You get to see so much of the little things from so many angles that it's got volume to it. Everyone did such a good job conveying what it's like to live here when you're not caught in the gears of being a Big Space Adventurer or whatever, the ways you might go about your day and how your life is impacted by the broader goings-on. It's good shit, they should make a whole show that's just folks across the galaxy going about their daily lives actually.

Short Story Rec

Friday, June 13th, 2025 05:55 am
gremdark: A single blue violet flower against a leafy background (violet)
[personal profile] gremdark
I was playing around in the haiku-only channel of the Battleship Exchange discord and ended up with a succinct pitch for one of my favorite short stories of all time. I figured I'd share it here.

Have you ever read
"Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather"?
So good. Won Hugo.

It's told in comments 
on a song explainer page 
about a ballad.

What the story's doing isn't unique, but it does it in a way that has stuck with me since I first read it. It's a weird, somewhat spooky love letter to a specific stripe of nerdy forum culture. And at just under 7,000 words, it's a relatively quick read.


Arcade Archives: Spinal Breakers

Friday, June 13th, 2025 08:25 am
tepidsnake: (Default)
[personal profile] tepidsnake

This week's Arcade Archives release is... Spinal Breakers (Video System, 1991)

PSN
EU
US

Switch
EU
US

The Japanese, International and US ROMs are included, the main differences being to the first stage, which was renamed from Germany to Europe in the International and US ROMs and a gate was completely removed from the background in the US version because, well, it was the Auschwitz gate. That gate has also been edited in the Japanese and International ROMs for this rerelease- the sign with text above it has been removed. The Red Cross has also been removed from a health item. Preference Settings allow players to display their current kill count and hit rate (using the in-game font, displayed in the border to the side of the screen).

HILDROIDS. They were living organisms created by mankind to do tasks too dangerous for normal humans, just workers and nothing more... But in the aftermath of a nuclear war that no-one knows the starting point of, the Earth's axis shifted and this changed the Hildroids, making them start to think and act on their own, killing their human hosts. As decades pass, Captain Waffle awakens from hybernetic stasis aboard a space station, and notices the Earth's axis shifting again, but this time... People and creatures of the past begin to appear, and the Hildroids take over their bodies and even start to change history. If the Earth's axis shifts again, it might be too late, and the Hildroids might change the past irrevecobly! Leaving his wife and daughter behind, Captain Waffle heads down to Earth in a one-seat escape ship, determined to end the Hildroids, find the cause of the nuclear war from long ago and save the past. It won't be easy- the shifting axis sends him through Nazi Germany, Ancient Greece, even prehistoric times with Hildroid-parasitised dinosaurs and cavemen baying for his blood! Can Captain Waffle do the impossible and save the past, present and future?

A crosshair shooter with horizontal scrolling a bit like SNK's NAM-1975, this has most of the mechanics you'd expect from a game like this- movement of the crosshair is tied to character movement unless you hold the button to fire wherein your target reticle speeds up, destroy background objects for fun and items, etc.- but there's a few odd things outside the plot. Most importantly, rolling from side to side, usually a 'get out of trouble' button in this genre, does not give you invincibility frames, so if you brush against any bullets or projectiles mid-roll, you're taking damage. The thing is, Waffle's roll brings him very low to the ground, so the trick is to use the roll to 'duck' under projectiles instead of using it with wanton abandon. There's also quite a few items including stronger normal bullets and grenade launcher rounds which are very handy for clearing the screen and uncovering more items. Finally, each stage has a time limit but you don't need to worry about that too much, you mostly have enough time, but if you let it run out, well...

If that story hasn't clued you in, Spinal Breakers is a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Fight Nazis, dinosaurs and horrible flesh-creatures across mulriple time periods! Destroy background objects like trees and corpses that explode into piles of gore! The final boss is just a gigantic pile of gore and wires trying to kill you to start a nuclear war! The protagonist is called Captain Waffle!! (That last one, according to the Hamster stream and as translated by Gosokkyu, is because the development staff really liked the waffles at a local convenience store, so they added a waffle item and named the hero after them) The whole aesthetic is very low-rent, back-of-the-video-shop VHS stuff, and while it can be in bad taste at points- at least they removed that sign in this version, but the corpses exploding are really grim and the bad multiple endings, showcased in LordBBH's 1CC video, are bleak (CW: implied suicide)- I kinda like it. Very video-nasty style, it has to be one of the gorier pre-Mortal Kombat games in the arcade, and it plays... Fine. It's a little clumsy in its implementation of the roll meaning some attacks are just going to hit you, the scrolling is a bit slow and Waffle is a gigantic target, but I think this game activates the part of my brain that loves shlocky horror movies and it's pretty satisfying to nail each enemy, especially with the crunchy sound effects and super-detailed sprites. This is not a game for everyone and you might prefer to stick with the likes of Cabal and NAM-1975 that are more polished and better games overall... But this one is memorable, you'll remember it long after you play it.

 
Oh, and if you recognise Waffle, he's in another Video System game as a secret character in Aero Fighters 3, piloting the Diabloon from Turbo Force! The Aero Fighters series has a lot of characters from all over the Video System world, including Lethal Crash Race, Karate Blazers and even Tao Taido. It's a vast universe.

Also, no, you don't break any spines in Spinal Breakers. Boo.

 

(no subject)

Thursday, June 12th, 2025 10:05 am
stardust_rifle: A cartoon-style image of of a fluffy brown cat sitting upright and reading a book, overlayed over a sparkly purple circle. (Default)
[personal profile] stardust_rifle
It kind of says a lot about me that when I was going "This character has the facade of a cool, normal, relatable person that you'd like to be friends with, but actually they're a dangerous vampiric predatory" when I was creating Wren (one of my Tzimisce OCs), the "cool normal relatable person that you'd like to be friends with" facade that I came up with was "autistic nonbinary taxidermist with the flattest effect known to man".

June 2025

S M T W T F S
1 234567
89 10 11121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
2930     

Most Popular Tags

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags