grouchy [she/her]
Tactics Ogre (LUCT or the remake, not the GBA entry which has a very mediocre story). The whole Ogre Battle franchise is pretty interesting but the other games are more RTS I think? Sucks that the series will never be properly finished. (I haven’t finished the N64 one though – my impression is that the story is worse than the Matsuno games but still fairly solid.)
I also liked the original Front Mission a lot (enjoyed the extra content in the DS version too), but I do wonder how the politics holds up since it’s been years since I played. If nothing else the music is fantastic.
(Tactics Ogre > FFT imo.)
I’m absolutely terrible at reading theory (as in I’ll sometimes get the urge and read 3-5 pages, nod, then put it down for months), but there’s an early paragraph in Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed that may be relevant here?
Sectarianism, fed by fanaticism, is always castrating. Radicalization, nourished by a critical spirit, is always creative. Sectarianism mythicizes and thereby alienates; radicalization criticizes and thereby liberates. Radicalization involves increased commitment to the position one has chosen, and thus ever greater engagement in the effort to transform concrete, objective reality. Conversely, sectarianism, because it is mythicizing and irrational, turns reality into a false (and therefore unchangeable) “reality.”
Not sure if this is elaborated on later. I get you though, I often feel the same way after a lifetime of thinking “extreme = bad, moderate = good”, especially when I remember how thoroughly convinced I was that my worldview was right. It’s hard to reconcile how “obvious” everything seems now with how blindly confident I was before. One of the things that helped was realizing just how many of the people from history* I genuinely admired/respected were actually socialists or communists and just completely misrepresented by popular media. Knowing how much propaganda we’ve been wading through our entire lives without even being conscious of it, I think these feelings are probably natural.
* or even contemporary figures like Hayao Miyazaki, whom I vividly remember being consistently framed as some sort of super lib when he was first introduced to mainstream Western pop culture
Hate to admit it, but I mentally checked out months ago. The Asian immigrant communities in my area are very anticommunist and all this shit is just gonna make them double down. Also been seriously fucking worried since last year about manufactured interracial tensions (i.e. the rooftop Koreans bs) – just feel really cynical about everything these days. Libs being libs, chuds being chuds – hard to stay sane about it all.
(I’m not qualified for sensitivity reading, but I can give a teensy bit of advice about the self-pubbing, though I’m no longer up to date on industry news at all so take with a grain of salt.)
I had to pull it to make it free on Amazon
It’s been years since I last checked (cuz fuck Amazon), but is price-matching no longer a thing*? Only KU requires exclusivity, the actual KDP platform doesn’t afaik. Used to be people would set their stuff free on Smashwords and let Amazon automatically match down. Nowadays Draft2Digital is a lot more convenient for that (they are purely a distributor rather than another storefront), but I also still dump my stuff on Smashwords because why not. Also shouldn’t underestimate the other markets – B&N, Kobo, Google have all done decently for me, though it varies by pen name/genre and I think I was lucky to get into Google’s platform directly early on.
* I wouldn’t be surprised, cuz fuck Amazon
That said, if the money genuinely doesn’t mean anything to you, you might as well just upload to webfic sites/serial apps like Wattpad instead of staying in the narrow confines of Amazon. (Actually, I have my issues with Wattpad, but sites like it are an option that definitely shouldn’t be overlooked.) Generally KU is only worth it imo if you’re trying to make some quick cash AND you’re willing to game the system with keywords, paid promotions, and general SEO bullshit. Right now you’re missing out on a whole chunk of readers like me who only use epubs instead of mobi, younger readers who enjoy the interactivity of the apps, and international readers who can’t afford US pricing.
No shampoo doesn’t mean you don’t wash at all, lol. It probably does depend on hair type and skin condition though. Personally, I only shampoo twice a week max and have been doing so since I was in college, it’s not a recent fad or anything. (I also use soap/bodywash very sparingly, basically only if I’ve been sweating or in the rain or whatever.)
I have very long hair that’s normally straight (more or less) but goes POOF in humidity, and also very bad/dry skin. I can’t claim to understand the science behind it if there is any, so this is just anecdotal evidence at best, but using dandruff shampoo when I was a kid always made my skin condition worse. Lessening shampoo/soap usage was the only thing that helped. Exfoliating is pretty much all that’s really necessary for the “clean” feeling, and I also stopped getting split ends as much after cutting out silicone-based products (tbh still don’t know if that’ s pseudoscience or not, but it worked for me so shrug).
In fact, when I’m in a humid climate I just wash with conditioner instead. Cleans just as effectively and doesn’t feel particularly greasy if you’re just using a cheap conditioner instead of fancy shit, and really goes to show that shampoo is probably not as necessary as people think it is. (Look into “co-washing,” it was and probably still is a thing on curly hair forums for a while.)
很可惜, 我從小學的是繁體字… 大概都看得懂檢體,可是沒辦法寫, 有一點不好意思. Don’t think it’s something I can unlearn at this point in my life, unfortunately.
Also my Chinese is probably filled with bad habits/ABCisms/Chinglish from growing up in an immigrant family. 平常不太喜歡用中文溝通, 因為每次都覺得像個十歲小孩在講話. But I feel guilty about letting my communication skills lapse as I mainly use my education to read nerd shit nowadays (I have a decent amount of self-taught classical Chinese under my belt if anyone is into that), so hope it’s all right if I pop in now and then even if I can only write in trad.
(Sorry to all of you trying to practice 漢字, this is probably really confusing)
/fangirl hat on
I love his JP and EN voice actors too, but Zhongli’s Chinese voice is perfection. If you haven’t heard him waxing poetic in the original dub you’re missing out.
/fangirl hat off
I’ve never seen a gamer community that isn’t full of whiny, obnoxious drama llamas, even when they have a valid point. It’s a cross-cultural phenomenon, too, which is… impressive in its own way.
(Just some mild venting about entirely trivial shit, move along)