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girlfriendsofthegalaxy · 8 months ago

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tuesday again 3/5/2024

really fucking around in Breath of the Wild and not defeating Ganon, even though i think i am fairly well prepared, which is probably indicative of something or a metaphor for some larger issue. oh well! guess we'll never know!

listening

Rock the Jungle by The Daniel Pemberton TV Orchestra, off an album of music from and inspired by LittleBigPlanet, a video game i have never played. Daniel Pemberton is a remarkably prolific british composer who mostly does film these days but also does a lot of BBC stuff.

youtube

this is the kind of scrubby pad to the brain electronica i need sometimes. i think these are heavily filtered and processed kookaburra sounds? at about the minute fifteen mark it adds a rolling, rollicking bassline that is, as im sure we all know by now, fucking catnip to me. at about 2:20 it adds alarm blares that fade in and out of a sort of disco-y organ? it uses its five minute runtime pretty well imo. i think this was off the spotify discover weekly.

reading

T Kingfisher's The Clockwork Boys, recced by @rae-being-naughty lo these many months ago, and my library hold finally came in. the goodreads blurb is a remarkably accurate sales pitch so let's yoink that

A paladin, an assassin, a forger, and a scholar ride out of town. It’s not the start of a joke, but rather an espionage mission with deadly serious stakes. T. Kingfisher’s new novel begins the tale of a murderous band of criminals (and a scholar), thrown together in an attempt to unravel the secret of the Clockwork Boys, mechanical soldiers from a neighboring kingdom that promise ruin to the Dowager’s city. If they succeed, rewards and pardons await, but that requires a long journey through enemy territory, directly into the capital. It also requires them to refrain from killing each other along the way! At turns darkly comic and touching, Clockwork Boys puts together a broken group of people trying to make the most of the rest of their lives as they drive forward on their suicide mission.

i had a lot of fun with this! very pratchett-esque in its imperial critique through bureaucratic loopholes thereof, which is catnip to me, but i do think Kingfisher is simply better at writing women. the forger is an only child and it fucking shows.

i think if it were 5% more devoted to Humorous Bits and didn't have some nice character work between the forging accountant and the big sad blond paladin man, i would have gotten frustrated with it. i think it is simply more of a comedy than any of its blurbs suggest, and it can be difficult to ride that line between comedy and character growth through desperate acts without getting a little bit of whiplash. this is me being very depressed and a bit nitpicky though. the line "Time passed, like a kidney stone" is going to stick in my brain for a while. i already have the sequel on hold

watching

if you do nothing else today could you please watch this car chase for me? ok thanks

youtube

Gunsmith Cats is a three-episode OVA that's a fancam of the american city of chicago and the cool girls that live and shoot and drive there, but let's just yank the MyAnimeList description

In the dangerous suburbs of Chicago, skilled bounty hunters Irene "Rally" Vincent and "Minnie" May Hopkins run Gunsmith Cats, a firearms store of questionable legality. One day, Bill Collins, an agent for the Chicago branch of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, blackmails Rally and May into working with him on a case. The stakes are high, but Rally’s gunmanship and May’s knowledge of explosives are unmatched. As Rally and May unravel the secrets of the case, the two will need to use guns and grenades while being faster, stronger, and better than everyone else in order to stay alive.

youtube

all three episodes are free (in really nice quality) on youtube. i pitched this to wendy as "rally is jigen lupinthethird's little sister" and her driving skills and marksmanship... i'm not sure who would win between them but i wouldn't like to live on the difference.

animators, historically, hate animating guns and cars, except for the masochistic ones who use it to flex. there are at least three shots in each episode where i want to stand up and hold my cat above my head and hoot like a fuckin tusken raider. in the first episode, there's a raid on a smuggling warehouse (you know, a warehouse) where the BATF agent and Rally throw each other their guns and have a really cool FALLING OFF A CATWALK back to back shootout. it's hard to describe. watch the episode. i wish there were more than three episodes.

this is an OVA that, aside from the requisite panty shot and WHOOPS my whole shirt tore (one of each per episode per girl) is fairly normal about women? rally and minnie are...roommates. that bicker and eat pizza. they have a cool network of other slightly shady women they interact with a lot, and the big bad for most of the episodes is also a woman. this isn't like a bastion of feminism or anything it's just neat. sort of middling on the ass portion of the Weeb Ass Shit scale. low on the weeb and shit parts too. again this is a fancam of chicago with cool girls

i watched this bc i was trying to use up kanopy credits and came across the precursor to this, Riding Bean, which i did not love for several reasons (the big one being the legitimately pedophilic lesbian relationship) but the creator took the concept of Rally out of that forty minute...experiment? and that led me to Gunsmith Cats. thank u ppl who put free anime on youtube

playing

still futzing about in breath of the wild. fucking around with sidequests and a sudden need to at least discover all the shrines.

for example, i did all the labyrinth shrines. underneath the akkala labyrinth is the scariest room in the world, bc six of those fuckers are alive and they will all target you the instant you open that chest.

cannot be bothered with the eventide island shrine yet (the roguelike) bc it frustrates the hell out of me. did the thyplo forest one, which was extremely annoying bc it dimmed my whole TV screen (including the UI) instead of just dimming the game itself. im sure someone thought that would be such a cool detail but instead i found it extremely annoying and vey difficult to swap weapons or start campfires.

and then i trundled through a list of shrine quests, bc i apparently had TWELVE missing?? three were korok trials, one was eventide (apparently it only shows up as a quest if you are on the island or have finished it, bc if u die on the island it kicks you back to a pre-island save lmao) so for the others: three i just had to talk to people to officially start and then immediately complete the quest. remember when i was anxious about softlocking myself out of the jungle dragon shrine quest bc i went right there instead of talking to Kass? never fear, nintendo's got my back

"kay how did you possibly miss reading the giant stone tablet to start this quest--" i am not a clever woman. i go "oh i know what to do!!!" when i see the Orb and hare off without looking around further.

A Brother's Roast i missed bc i forgot to talk to everyone in Goron City after defeating rudania, didn't run across Test of Will (the Goron challenge in the Gerudo highlands) bc i forgot to look off that side of the tower and was very focused on gliding into the labyrinth at the right spot, and didn't run across Guardian Slideshow on the far south beaches bc i hadn't explored there yet.

A Stolen Heirloom was deeply annoying. i had four out of five quests complete to unlock this, but there is an unmarked side quest where you have to go into this lady's house at night to figure out she wants fireflies. maybe she has some ambient daytime barks about this? i have never heard them. this was a little obtuse. also i don't love the stealth in this game. this game's stealth really works when you are well out of detection range bc u have a sniper bow, and i find it works less well for me when i have to follow a target. no i haven't finished the korok stealth trial either.

non-shrine nonsense:

ive been using Stasis as a sort of VATS equivalent. in fallout, i like to hit VATS every once in a while just to see who's out there. how many radroaches are nearby. this also highlights most interactable things which i think is nice of the game

gerudo town stuff: i missed this sand seal racing challenge by SO little the first time which annoyed me so much, it took me six more tries to beat the damn thing. i am very charmed that they actually put in a garden for the kid who was trying to grow a garden!

some beach vegetation mysteries: im really baffled by this singular hearty radish growing in full sun in what is essentially sand with a dusting of palm bark. all the other hearty radishes i have seen are in deep forests with partial sun and lots of leaf litter. what the hell is this then. plus a neat little unique sea wrack? korok circle instead of the usual lilypads.

i didn't know this game knew how to do rainbows at all, let alone double ones!

i will leave you with my many attempts to make stamina potions.

making

making things requires both the perfect levels of anxiety (too little anxiety and im out doing normal people things, too much anxiety and i shut down, a medium level means im frantically making things to distract myself. we are at the high end of medium) and some level of income bc i inevitably need one or two things to finish projects. eg we are at the level of anxiety where i am only able to do simple things like repainting a whole bunch of big frames for my maps (procured when i had money) but i need more matboard. so they are sitting, 90% finished, in my office closet.

garden update: more than half my bush beans came up with no leaves and promptly died, which could be due to any number of things but im choosing to believe it's bc my bestie's five year old planted them a little too deeply. so it goes. all the sweet peas are fine, all my normal peas and most of my regular climbing beans came up. a little annoyed bc only a third of my nasturtiums came up even after soaking them for 24h as recommended. the shit i Bought (tomatoes, marigolds, mint, rosemary) is doing fine. the spinach and dill i planted are doing fine too, although the spinach also had about a 50% germination rate. this does mean i don't need to thin them but. Hm. yanno?

#tuesday again #tuesday again no problem

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