Athene Miranda's Dedjurnle

so, MGS4?

Sat, 29 Nov 2008 05:36:55 GMT

If I was Sunny, I'd've murdered all the other characters by now. Srsly.

Also:
a) I have a biometrics appointment in Atlanta tomorrow morning. I don't know what they're going to do to me, but hey, that's life.
b) My mood icons vanished after the Dj server move, and still aren't back - I finally made a support request about it, and am using Reicons again in the meantime. <3 Rei.
c) Agla is a mean slavedriver and is making me work on my tarot blog again. I hope I keep it up, though - I've got, what, 29 to go.

Fri, 28 Nov 2008 03:38:56 GMT

AldebaranMatagot: That's like me and notebooks.
athene1miranda: oh?
athene1miranda: i have two of those currently - my pretty swan one and a more scrappy one. the scrappy one is full of recipes and badly drafted porn.
AldebaranMatagot: Which sort of sums up your mind, really.
AldebaranMatagot: :P
athene1miranda: .....
AldebaranMatagot: *puts out hand to be slapped*

"What you're looking for here is deniable plausibility."

Thu, 27 Nov 2008 06:54:48 GMT

...or so S. said about the state of my writings a few days ago.

Insomnia and snatched naps, Christmas, sunshine and Metal Gear; one of these things does not fit, and it's the sunshine. It's creepy; it doesn't square with the grim grey clouds I know come with the season. The lawn decorations - Santas, giant wreaths and red ribbons, those big white reindeer, the whole shelfload of crap I only recognise from the Sims 2 Holiday pack - started coming out the day after Halloween. When it was just a couple of the houses on my three-mile daily walk/jog, I hoped to catch someone in one of those gardens so I could yell 'MERRY CHRISTMAS!' at them, but now everyone's doing it and that would no longer be funny. (Everyone except the two stragglers who still have damp, saggy McPalin signs on their front lawns).

And I thought a chain of coloured lights at the window was gaudy. Dee has, I believe, gone mad; there is a giant fake tree in one corner of her sitting room, her collection of angel statuettes has multiplied and spread far beyond their usual range, and even mirrors now have bows and snowmen pinned to their corners, lying in wait. There are two velveteen stockings hanging from her mantel - one says Peace and one says Joy. I keep expecting to see a few new ones reading Fury, Sorrow, End...

I'm finally playing MGS4, just. The text is almost too small to read and I've barely figured out how to kill things yet, but oh god it's so blissful just to wander around in, unnoticed and alive.

Thanksgiving tomorrow. I made bikkits, but burned some of them because I was tired. I think I'm making a ginger cake tomorrow morning too. What I want is to get my head in gear and get some stuff on paper - letters and cards for a few people especially - but I keep finding myself playing comatose SMACX games instead. :/

The NFL channel Dee is always watching has a Champions League roundup show. I can't quite believe the way I sat there making cute noises at it; I don't even like the game, I just miss mocking it with my sister. ;__;

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 07:13:33 GMT

I have insomnia again. I also have 'Wtf is wrong with you?' regarding the entire American species, again, or at least all the ones hereabouts; they cannot bear a little autumn nip, they are entirely ill-equipped to snug it out, and their houses are so shoddy and draughty that they actually have to worry about burst pipes indoors, something that rarely occurs in colder places I've lived in. They don't have draught excluders (I've laid folded towels down) or woolly socks.

I've been walking, reading, running, dithering, dreaming - still all in circles. We went to see Quantum of Solace last week, and watched Casino Royale at home last night; the latter is, still, as dramatic and thoughtful and almost as strong in culture as the book it was named after. I adore that film. QoS was great fun, but compares poorly in the intelligence stakes, and has far less emotional depth. And still, I walked out of it telling anyone who'd listen how much I miss Europe. Europe which can survive a little unexpected cold, for the same bloody reason - we didn't, because we couldn't, do this foul thing America has done to itself, of taking the beautiful land we walk on and treating it slobbishly, of laying down as much as they could afford with no regard for anything but size and money. And then Americans go to their giant multiplexes and look at things from Europe, and by absorbing that morsel of culture and reality, they are able to survive in their dead state of numbers and nothing - like vampires.

This is, of course, just my bitchy, homesick opinion of the situation. (Europe has, of course, done the opposite: taken down all the trees, tamed the hills level. But I would rather be there right now; however, I am not, and there is yet more I want to learn about this place).

I'm still trying to work out what was being said, in an emotional sense; the original Quantum of Solace was a Fleming short story which barely involved JB himself; he was merely listening to someone else's story (the same's also true of Octopussy - which, in the canon, was the name of someone's pet octopus, you fucking pervs), one I barely remember now other than that it was about cruelty. About people who do not even have that much, not the slightest bit of solace in their hearts. So I felt like it was being turned on JB and the story was going 'No. Yes. Maybe. Yes. But no!' at its own title. I wish this arc was gearing up to a remake of From Russia With Love, but I bet it's not. Rights issues, I can smell it.

Also, Camille was hot, but she looks a bit like Wren sometimes, and that's scary. Craig was hotter in the last film than this one. Not enough naked, and worse, some of it involved socks.

...

Total Thought Control: 618 energy credits
2 decent infantry units, 1 transport foil, 9 plasma garrisons and a sea former: 12 minerals/turn.
Planetary Transit System: 300 minerals.
A petulant phone call from Miriam demanding I now give her Superconductor or, or, or else: priceless.
(For everything else, there's the Merchant Exchange).

And, I love this song. It is my favourite thing on the new Dar album. It may be the best song about a single scientific experiment that has ever been written. Ever. Album is mostly underwhelming, but also has a nice - though strangely unconvincing - cover of Midnight Radio, plus I really like the last track, Summerday.

You all need to read this, btw.

and washington, d.c. thinks that atlanta-

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 04:36:45 GMT

win.

(Edit: Upstairs, Danielle is watching Fox News just so she can point and laugh at things).

Mon, 03 Nov 2008 19:15:16 GMT

the worlds of civilised people says:
pider :(
aihal says:
pider :( :(
the worlds of civilised people says:
*huggleprotects*
the worlds of civilised people says:
how big was it?
aihal says:
...I'm shit at estimating sizes (insert penis joke here), but definitely too big to fit under our average tea mug.
the worlds of civilised people says:
goddddamn
the worlds of civilised people says:
;____;
the worlds of civilised people says:
bet it escaped from the secret bioweapons lab underneath Park Royal station
aihal says:
SSSH
aihal says:
damnit, now I'm going to have to hack GCHQ again :(
the worlds of civilised people says:
:(

possibly the best 538 comment ever:

Mon, 20 Oct 2008 19:05:30 GMT

'We are all Fake Virginians now.'

i must not:

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 02:08:41 GMT

...keep asking my male friends if they'd like to be the 'live boy'.
...encourage my dog to pee on McPalin lawn signs. (I live in what used to be Newt Gingrich's district. I only recently found that out).
...refresh 538 again.
...compare IRL to an RPG or RTS too closely.
...eat tootsie rolls. They don't even taste of anything. Why do I even like them? I want a Sour Chewit, one of the yellow and blue ones.

I have been taking long walks again, and watching Americans put up decorations for this bizarrely commercialised Scottish folk practice they (so I have heard) get fixated on at this time every year. What really throws me is that they make Guys, but not for the same reason British people make Guys (in the latter case: symbolic sectarian hatred). Now, most years I hate autumn, but now I kinda get it: sit outside with a book, and it's a bit like it is in Sims 2. Trees make all the difference; trees, expanse, falling leaves and long walks.

I know it's a winter song, but I keep listening to Mortal City. Just try it, and tell me it doesn't fit.

because Ting and me and nanowrimo and COOKING:

Wed, 15 Oct 2008 02:46:08 GMT

Illusory Caesura says:
"it can't hurt to try" - honestly, you've written before. you can't be that naive.
Illusory Caesura says:
It CAN hurt to try.
spider's web forest says:
........
Illusory Caesura says:
It can hurt a LOT.

so, about that extremely cheesy toku...

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:43:15 GMT

The throwaway villain in episode 7 reminded me of my sister, because she was obsessed with Rachmaninov's 18th Variation and she kept cutting prettyboys' fingers off and putting them in her freezer.

That aside, it's all hilariously bad effects, wangst and slash potential. Yay!

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:13:51 GMT

So much for that.

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 18:14:05 GMT

Today I am being simultaneously mentally hyperactive and completely dead from the neck up, sod. I have stolen a silly internets mneme from Jay because I can. I don't tag people.

People who have been tagged must write their answers on their blogs & replace any question that they dislike with a new question formulated by themselves.

01. What is essential for your happiness?
Mobility, mental stimulation, people to love, and some form of contact with god.

02. What are you wearing at the moment?
My orange dressing gown with blue dragons on it. I have six dressing gowns; people keep giving me them - perhaps they all think I'm somehow Cowardian?

03. Who is/was your favourite cartoon character?
Stewie, I guess. I'm not much one for cartoons.

04. What is your favourite scent?
Falling rain. Wood smoke. London.

05. Are you a morning person or a night person?
Neitherish. I really like being a morning person but I'm also a ravening insomniac, and besides, the people in my head have a preference for emerging between midnight and dawn. On a perfect day, ie. one that hardly ever happens, I get a good night's sleep and wake at 5am, fully rested, raring to plot against you all.

06. What do you drink the most?
Water. There's no running water in our part of this house, so I keep three gallon bottles of it under my desk, for Grendel's benefit as well as my own. The only other thing I drink is coffee, though I'll probably be drinking more tea as it gets colder. I still have lots left from what my sister sent me at the start of summer.

07. What colour is your room?
Green and blue - dark shades of both. It's very pretty but I'd've preferred something that swallowed less light, but it's okay; there would never have been enough light in here anyway.

08. Who was your first big crush?
Adrienne - the penfriend I had when I was 16. I still have no idea what she looks like.

09. What did you want to be when you grew up?
A ballerina. But mostly I just wanted to grow up; I still do. I hated being a child.

10. What mythological figure are you?
...*is still mentally throwing things at Kiya for this one, not to mention the part about Horus's left eye*

11. What characters are overrated?
Any and all vampires.

12. If you could live in any historical period, which would you choose?
I'm quite happy with when I am, thanks.

13. What is your current desktop?
This.

14. What kind of person do you think the person who tagged you is?
Someone I miss talking the world into pieces with. Someone who until recently I never realised is as chronically Piscean as I am.

15. What are you afraid of?
Ever since That Incident, I've had scary dreams about huge, evil-looking insects whenever something else is bothering me. Paperwork, paperwork terrifies me. The subset of humans who I call 'the big people' terrify me. But for the most part I'm way less risk-averse than other people are; I like to hitch-hike, to walk about alone at night, to go to strange places for no reason. Currently, reading around, electoral fraud is terrifying me, but I am trying to tell myself that it's only being talked about by the cranks.

16. What's your favourite item of clothing?
The dress I've had ever since I stole it off my sister 10-ish years ago. It's ragging at the seams and missing a few buttons but is the best thing ever.

17. What are you into right now?
FFXII fandom, bad cooking experiments, obsessively refreshing 538, watching extremely cheesy toku with Matthew.

18. What did you do today?
Nothing yet except take a bath, read my internets and drink some coffee. My head isn't working, which is a shame because I want to get some reading and writing in.

19. What do you want?
A clear head, Dee and Matthew to print off and sign the crap they have to do for me to get my resident's card, people to stop asking me about all that ever again, this sodding election to be over without any fraud plsthnx, the plot bunnies to behave, a big pile of money, a jetpack and a new Dar album.

20. What should you be doing right now?
Writing porn, I think. It's seriously the only thing I feel obliged to do with my life lately.

21. What's the meaning behind your LJ username/name/nicknames you go by?
Middle name + something about tarot that I'd only just grokked at the time I picked it. I've outgrown it and usually just go by 'Thene' now.

hm.

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 20:38:01 GMT

I just read this on 538, and it caused me to skip back and look at a couple of their old flickr slideshows that I hadn't bothered watching, and...this photograph jumped out at me for no damn reason. *shrugs* Look.

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:43:36 GMT

aihal says:
as I said to Z the other day, You Know You've Played Too Much Sims When #42: a Sim turns their radio on while you aren't paying attention and you start singing along. IN SIMLISH.

aihal says:
...as with people with whom I can sleep in the same room, dogs I like tend to be rare breeds.
cheap tricks says:
that is as i feared :(
aihal says:
not impossible, though :)
cheap tricks says:
he's very nice though. quite a cuddleslut. understands the words 'no', 'move', and 'drop'.
aihal says:
...so he could write a Fatboy Slim song?
cheap tricks says:
......

musical adventures

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 21:55:38 GMT

I have been remiss in updating this-thing. We went to Atlanta to see the Mars Volta a couple of days ago; I'd never been to the Tabernacle before, and it is a beautiful venue with a sound system that does not work at ALL. But god, it made me happy. We were sat up in the gallery, and I found it was more like a real concert hall than any other I've seen in the USA - reminded me a bit of Manchester Opera House, though more hippyish, and not quite as suicidally steep. So we were a ways from the stage but had a great view, and Cedric obliged us by showing off his arse. Tiny Cedric, all hair and noise, turning handsprings, doing whip tricks with a microphone wire, and being butchered by the godawful sound system. I wanted to put him in my pocket and take him home so I could listen to him properly, but Matthew had his eyes on the delicious, topless drummer who (for reasons I will not dare to speculate on) was being stared at, along with other small interactions, by Omar for the entire show. It's incredibly rare for boys to make any impression on Matthew. Most odd.

Matthew and the other people we were with - Rachel, Marci and Chason - are all far more musically smart than me; I was just being happy there, relaxing in the crazy sound, the dancing lights, the scent of marijuana, while my friends were taking it apart with their clever brains. I gained new appreciation for the last two albums; Frances The Mute is my obsession, you know that, but I think I can get more into the rest of it now.

As I said, up in the middle of the gallery. Omar (I think it was Omar) flung a fistful of picks into the audience at the end, and one of them nailed me square in the chest. It has their name on it and everything. Matthew says it's a 'heavy' one, not the sort he uses (he prefers not to use them at all anyway), and that I should put a hole through it and string it from something. Currently it's just sat on my desk making me smile like a loon.

Bizarre recent discovery: US English has different names for musical notations to real English. Bloody Wikipedia even redirects to the US names. When I uttered the word 'quaver', Matthew looked at me like I'd grown a second head. It's not just the difference that bugs me, it's the length of time it took me to realise. I don't get it. Can I truly live in a land where the phrase 'gnat's crotchet' has no meaning? :(

[Humph ;___;]

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:46:05 GMT

So. I finished that game, then did what I usually do after a long, absorbing game; despair. It's part of the whole self-medicating-by-videogame cycle - probably why MMOs are so attractive to some, but me, no, I'm not even going to go there. When something's been sucking at your cognition so well for so long being without it causes aimlessness.

I did the logical thing: picked up another game, Tomb Raider: Legend. But Tomb Raider has changed. I can't yet intuit the new controls - I can look at the game and know what I want to do, but not how to get it done, and that's frustrating because Tomb Raider used to be a matter of certainty. You always knew what would happen when you pushed a button. Now you can't even use the D-pad for movement any more, and I never used the stick in Tomb Raider, ever. Frustration. I need to give it more time, I know. Or just go back to reading books instead.

I have been looking at the very surface of fandom, and have seen unspeakable horrors lurking in the depths of Livejournal. A Balthier/Penelo comm. Even a bloody Vaan/Reks comm. *shudders* The Basch/Balthier one is most pleasing, but I feel I am only just starting to discover how badhilariouswrong a limit break quote can be. Oh no. No. And then there's the AUs. I am not categorically averse to AUs but I don't think FFXII should be going there.

Jojo is trying to goad me into writing more yuri...I want to, but I don't know if my brain is up to it. :( What brain? I know.

from last night:

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 06:23:00 GMT

There was a dog lying between us, on his back with his feet in the air. This isn't his favourite sleep position but Matthew had rolled him into it. The dog had recently had a midnight snack, and his breath smelt a little of it.

I complained, and Matthew explained that yes, that was why he had made sure the dog's muzzle was pointed at me.

...

So I took Grendel by the jaw and pointed it at Matthew, and declared that it was "Duck season."

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 03:14:50 GMT

I'm tempting to c/p every adjective I'm deleting from this file and post them here, but really, no, they are far too embarrassing. Oblivion awaits them.

Sometimes I fail so hard I amaze even myself!

omg, game.

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:44:53 GMT

I wrote a lot of words yesterday but I didn't mention game. Game. I'm very close to done with it, and I'm currently toying with rare drops to try and make a Tournesol, wondering about killing Yiazmet (I know I could but I also know that doing so would make the Hellwyrm seem entertaining. FYI, I did not find the Hellwyrm entertaining. I actually kinda fell asleep in the middle and roused myself when I realised Fran had died again. Ultima, Zodiark and Behemoth King were difficult and entertaining). If I can get Bubbled hp up to over 9000 I might try to kill Omega again. Our last assault wasn't pretty. :(

But...plot. In terms of form I'd say it's like BGII, in that most of the movement and play is entirely incidental to the plot; compared to, say, FFVII the plot-to-square-inch-map ratio is incredibly low. So even though the world is made of plot, if you read the ground with bare feet, it doesn't feel like it's made of plot - unlike the Planet in VII. Also intriguing; Matthew and me are quibbling over this, but it seems like, unlike virtually every other videogame landmass, Ivalice is in a southern hemisphere.

One thing I've always wanted to be able to do in a videogame is be the villain. Not an anti-hero or an evil main character, but to actually walk through a videogame plot from the POV of a villain - one of the determined, cunning antagonists, Liquid Snake or Sephiroth or Jon Irenicus. I want to plot against you.

And here, those dangerous, power-mad people who obey the whims of mad gods who only they know, who'd break the human world because the human world deserves it, the people who make the world tremble just by walking on it, the people who have to be stopped for the good of humanity... In XII, that's us. That feels distinctly like us. One of us, anyway. 'Don't lose your heart to a stone.'

Ashe and Sephiroth are the same person!

The people in my head have decided they want to move to the Necrohol, btw. It's got that lovely Oxford Circus Station feeling, except that it's full of demons, zombies and robots. Let me rephrase that: It's got that lovely Oxford Circus Station feeling. I miss London, really I do.

the onward march of the FMT, etc.

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 05:59:59 GMT

It's been a while since I've mentioned t'otherblog on this one; I tend to keep things in different boxes on purpose, which is probably bad for me, but hey.

I started it just to dump some rants I didn't feel belonged here, either because here is too cosy or because I wanted a less personal space for them. There's lounging, and there's staging. Two things I wasn't particularly expecting happened:

a) the social internets. This is a weirdie in blogland because people are trying to be both communal and competitive, and the two clearly work together; the more you foster community, the higher your stakes rise.

I don't want to play either of those games. I'm a chronic 9th - a Hermit-child, who's never more than a hop away from the trapdoor in the world's ceiling. Stepping back from social worlds is always an option. And in any case, blog society distinctly isn't my kind of internet society; neither my head nor my heart have much desire to live there, and I feel less like myself if I'm spending a lot of time on it. A while ago I pruned a lot of my Bloglines feeds - I killed a lot of sites I'd spent time with, the high-output feeds which I enjoyed reading and I'd used as social hubs to ensure that people in bloglandia knew who I was, because they were consuming more time than they were worth to me. You stay a few months on a busy feed, you've heard everything it'll ever be saying, and the internets rapidly becomes worthless if you're not leaving it the hell alone and going off to find new things to bring into it.

(I now have a mere 41 feeds left. Shut up. Most of them are really rare updaters. FiveThirtyEight is my one remaining vice feed - the one which updates 4 times a day, is almost never delightful, and which I can't bear to delete in spite of this. I blame statistics. How can I forego something with so many front-page pie charts? *sighs* *and deletes feed, with no promises to not add it again in mid-october. that makes 40, only three of which update every day. obv ICHC doesn't count*)

There are a lot of things I'm glad I read, and a lot of people I'm glad to have conversed with, but my path is elsewhere.

b) the FMT. I had no frigging idea that was going to happen.

I have no illusions of internets originality - dumping out the troves of scavenged information I have stuck in my head, sure, but I've got nothing earth-shattering for you. Yet about a year ago I assembled a rant about the brain-numbingly stupid usage of imaginary sex workers in sf/f, added a tacky homage to the Bechdel Test at the top, and somehow it stuck. It's had about 10000 pageloads (about half of them in the first two weeks of this August, due to one of those escalating spikes that takes unfortunate detours through Reddit). Three fairly big-league SF writers have linked to it on their personal sites. In the scheme of things this is not much; there are some people who get that much traffic every day, and there are many ideas which get more work done every day. But. I am still kinda boggled, because I had no frigging idea it was going to happen.

Ffamran/Zecht OTP

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 03:10:18 GMT

OMG.

stupid things I have done in videogames, #235789235:

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 16:28:15 GMT

a) sent my party off a-wandering, with a bit of help from Larsa
b) got lost somewhere full of monsters we shouldn't've been fighting, thus got beaten half to death
c) walked straight into fucking Adrammalech
d) almost, almost, had him there and then. You have no idea how close. Owww. :(
e) reloaded, did it all again, this time with a bit more warning, and beat him to a bloody pulp properly.
f) only then found the savepoint two chambers south of there.

I love this sodding game, really I do.

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 19:56:05 GMT

-I have really low energy lately. Reallyreally. I've been eating more than normal and doing very little and I still feel like I'm wasting away. I hope I do not have teh sick.

-FFXII win, ish. I have to concentrate very hard to even recall that there is a plot, but the gameplay is most pleasing. Have finally got the hang of limit breaks. Should not be fooling around in the waterway when we're this low-level.

-I feel between books right now, because I've not yet got into Altered Carbon.

-really, I could crawl in bed and sleep right now but I know we're going off on adventures as soon as M gets home.

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 19:23:02 GMT

Damn.

Thu, 14 Aug 2008 06:15:02 GMT

Nakki left on Monday, with the aim of driving to Canada on Tuesday. Since then I have seen Wall-E and watched a lot of 12-year-old Chinese people cavorting for my pleasure on NBC. (I hate NBC). That's about all.