Looking back on 2023...

    So, 2023 is ending, and I thought I should post about that, because that seems like a thing to do.

    To be honest, the Year of the Rabbit has not been kind to me, it feels like.  Which is weird, because I was born in the Year of the Rabbit myself.  Then again, I recall reading somewhere (around January, I suspect) that each cycle is connected to one of the five elements, so I guess whichever one 2023's Year of the Rabbit is connected to is bad for whatever one 1975's Year of the Rabbit was connected to?  (Or, you know, I just had a bad year and everything else is unconnected to that fact. 😅)  

    It's kind of weird, though; I don't really remember any of the past Years of the Rabbit, or even if the fact that it was same even mattered to me in the slightest.  I mean, obviously I didn't care for the first one.  Uh, I mean, the first one after 1975, since I was obviously unable to care while I was a newborn infant.  But I don't really have any memories of being 12.  Or rather, I have no memories connected to being 12:  I'm sure I remember plenty of things from that year, I just don't think of those memories in terms of my age at the time. 1987...I wanna say that's the year I graduated grade school?  Except that sounds kinda late for it, doesn't it?  Wait, if one typically is six when one starts first grade, then...yeah, being twelve when you graduate sixth grade does track.  So, yeah, that would be the year I graduated grade school and started high school.  (My high school was a combination high and junior high, so it was one school from 7th to 12th grade.)  In which case it was actually a pretty decent year for me in some respects--I met my high school best friend, the only person from high school I still have any contact with--but in other respects it was awful, since my entire high school experience can be summed up with one word:  pain.  As to the year I turned 24...nope, no memories whatsoever connected to being 24.  That would have been 1999?  Ack.  Nevermind.  Waaaaaaay too many memories, almost all of them bad.  That's when I...actually, no, if I go into too many details then I will totally be doxxing myself if anyone who knows me happens to stumble across this.  (Which is unlikely, but I'd still rather not take that risk.)  But it was a bad year for me.  So...turning 36...that would have been...2011.  Hmm.  Yeah, I actually do have zero memories connected to that year.  I'm wanting to say I got my second BA in 2010, in which case I was not currently in school in 2011, but maybe it was the year I started volunteering at the museum where I used to work.  In which case 2011 was probably pretty good for me?

    Anyway, as to why this year was not good, well, there's a lot on this blog about it already.  I was taking part in a game jam in my fledgling indie game dev hobby, and started getting heart palpitations, which became so bad that I dropped out of the jam and stopped writing altogether for about a week (maybe only a few days), and then decided I wouldn't do any more game dev until the heart palpitations were all cleared up.  (I did permit myself to write for non-game dev purposes...which in this case meant fan fiction.  So, so, so much fan fiction.)  They, uh, still aren't.  They're less frequent--a few spells per month--and pretty minor, but they still happen.  Meaning I haven't felt safe returning to game dev, despite that I was in the middle of rewriting an old series of my (many) unreleased novels and releasing them as interactive fiction.  So it's just sitting out there, the first two of seven, taunting the universe.  Admittedly, very few people have even interacted with the game pages, let alone actually read them, but that doesn't change how annoying it is not to be working on them.  But heart health is a scary thing and I don't want to tempt fate.  (And yes, I have seen doctors about this heart thing.  It's just that they can't find anything wrong with my heart.  I don't even have high blood pressure.)

    Looking back on the year, that's honestly been the major part of it.  Just more and more and more doing nothing because I'm scared to do anything.  Though also my favorite Chinese restaurant closed shortly after my birthday (my birthday was the last time I ate there, in fact) and although a new one has opened in the same space using the same name, my parents have eaten there since it reopened and they said the menu has changed and isn't as good.  😭  I also feel like my house has become even more of a roiling, uncleaned chaos, but I think part of that is the health thing; I'm afraid to do anything for fear of upsetting my heart.  Which is dumb, but somehow I got into that mindset and it's hard to push myself out of it again.

    But this is depressing, so let's change the subject!

    Please be amused by my very amateur attempts at photography instead:

    Since rabbits feature heavily in a few choice moments in Mo Dao Zu Shi, Goodsmile released special Year of the Rabbit Nendoroids of the two leads.  And somehow I didn't actually take them out of the boxes for some photographs until today. 😭  But they're super-adorable, right?  😁  I'm not sure how clear it is in this picture, but their eye highlights are little bunnies.  🐰  The bunny-ear headbands were the pre-order bonus for getting them directly from Goodsmile.  😁

    Anyway, looking ahead to next year...

    I don't do New Year's Resolutions.  Those seem like "promises I don't intend to keep," you know?  But I do have goals for next year.  Things I want to do, and hopefully will do.

    My goals (in no particular order) are:

• Polish up and release book three (it's already gotten a couple new drafts and I've already put it in the game engine, so it just needs polishing and some work on the glossary)
• Finish this @#$^#@$#ing fanfic that I've been working on since like April (it's at like 385k words now!)
• Post my dragon-based MDZS fanfic tomorrow (since it had gotten to nearly the end of the year, I figured may as well wait and post it in the Year of the Dragon, lol! (yes, I do know that technically that doesn't start until February, but humor me))
• Start exercising in some manner (if nothing else, there's supposed to be a Vocaloid version of Fitness Boxing coming out in a few months, that should help)
• Try to fix up my awful diet at least a little (I do plan to talk to my doctor about weight loss when I see her in January)
• Do at least a little cleaning around the house (hopefully enough that I can replace my dying refrigerator)
• Try and give away or sell some of the crap I don't need/want/use anymore
• Get my car fixed (it died on me again)

    Okay, admittedly, a lot of those sound like exactly what everyone says every year, but a lot of my health problems are coming to a point where I can't keep on going like this much longer, which has given me a lot more motivation to fix the problem, only I keep trying to diet too strictly and going off it and making things worse. 😭  (Hence why I plan to ask my doctor about it.  And hope she'll have something to say other than "let's cut you open and staple your stomach shut" because that is just cursed.)

    Hmm...what else did I want to say?

    I've made a few plans for the turning of the year.  I managed to finish the book I was reading today (volume 4 of The Husky and his White Cat Shizun) which is good, because I did not want that to be the first book I read in the new year, 'cause about half the volume is just the two leads being insanely horny for each other and refusing to do anything about it, until I just want to scream at them.  (It's a pity it's so insanely thirsty, because the actual plot of the novel is fairly interesting, but I'm not sure if I can put up with any more drowning in lust garbage.  It's agonizing to read.  Especially as someone who is both aromantic and asexual, because I can't even connect with it in the slightest.)  I'm going to read something short before the day ends so that it's not the last thing I read, either.  (The only short thing I haven't read before that's lying around is a sexually explicit fan comic for Promare, but I have a feeling it will actually contain far less horniness than that volume of The Husky and his White Cat Shizun.)  And then, at some point before midnight, I will start reading a book I got for Christmas, Insane Emperors, Sunken Cities, and Earthquake Machines by Garret Ryan.  It was one of the few presents I wasn't expecting, but I'm really looking forward to it:  I read one of his earlier books, and it was a lot of fun, a combination of things I already knew some of and interesting tidbits about the ancient world that I didn't know.  (I seem to recall that there was one thing in the previous book that I didn't agree with, but I can't remember what it was, specifically...though I'm betting it had to do with same sex relationships.  That tends to be the spot where straight male scholars drop the ball most often.)  Anyway, I figure that of all the unread books on my shelf, that's the best one to be reading at the turn of the year.   Well, that and I promised I'd let my mom read it when I was done with it, so I don't want to wait too long to get to it. 😅

    I have some sparkling apple juice to drink at midnight (I don't drink alcohol), and a naughty-but-not-too-naughty snack to enjoy with it, too.  I'll probably either get lost in playing My Time at Sandrock and barely notice midnight or I'll start watching Dungeons & Dragons:  Honor Among Thieves around quarter past ten to be watching that when the year ends.  Not connected to New Year's in any way, but it's on my unwatched Christmas gift pile, so...hmm.  Then again, maybe I should dive into Doctor Who instead, to usher out the 60th anniversary year?  (I got the second season for Christmas.  And I do mean the actual second season, as in the 1964-1965 season.  There's some real gems in there.  Also the unbearably awful "The Web Planet" which my brother and I couldn't even finish when we tried to watch it before. 😅  But it starts with "Planet of the Giants," which is pretty good, then goes into "The Dalek Invasion of Earth" which is better, and...anyway, there's a lot of really good ones in there.)  Hmm.  I'll have to think about which to do....but I'll probably end up gaming anyway. 😅  Oh!  That's right, I could also watch some anime on Crunchyroll:  there should be a new episode of The Apothecary Diaries, and I wanted to start watching Frieren...  (I still haven't had the courage to check out season two of Heaven Official's Blessing, in case the subtitles are as bad as the ones on the blu-ray...and New Year's Eve seems like a very bad time to take that risk...)

    Oh, yes!  Gaming!  That was it!

    Someone on one of the Discord servers I'm part of posted a thing about the games they loved that they played for the first time this year.  I thought I should do that, too.  In chronological order...

    (That's order played, btw, not order released.)  Technically, Sword and Fairy 6 probably doesn't belong, as I didn't quite love it, but...because of the different sizes of Switch and Playstation covers, it was going to be even more lopsided if it was only eight, like the version the person on the Ooblet server posted.  (Said person being primarily a PC gamer, they didn't have the different image shape issue.)  I mean, I suppose I could have tried to balance it out by removing Oshirabu, but...that would have felt much more wrong.  I did play more games that I loved this year, but there were a lot of remakes and remasters in my year, including things I had played in their original versions:  Xenoblade Chronicles, Final Fantasy, Grandia II, and Sam and Max Beyond Time and Space.  (There may have been even more than that and I'm just blanking on the others.  Though technically I only played about half of Xenoblade Chronicles on the Wii; I hit the point where one of the characters said something that pissed me off so badly I was like "yeah, I'm just going to put this aside for a while until I cool off..." and then I never ended up picking it up again. 😅)  I kinda shouldn't include My Time at Sandrock on this, since I only started it like two days ago, but...it's the type of game that's much more make-or-break on its mechanics than its story, so I already know.  😆  (Thankfully, there's a full character creation at the start, so you don't have to play as Mr. Generic from the cover there.  I'm playing as a woman with purple ponytails.  💜  Though if I'd known the town doctor was going to hit my character design sweet spot, I might have played as a guy after all in order to romance him.  (I do not do het romance in a game if I have any choice in the matter.  Just not how I roll.))  I still would have probably gone with purple hair, though.  I almost always choose purple hair when it's an option.)  Even more technically, Forager kind of doesn't belong, because I first started it when I bought that copy a year or so ago, only the TV I had at the time was not compatible with the Playstation 4 and I lost so much of the edges of the picture that the game was literally unplayable because so much of its UI was off-screen.  Therefore, I had only played like two, three minutes before I gave up in despair.  When I got a new TV this year, I started playing it again for real...ah, crap.  It and Sword and Fairy 6 are in the wrong places; I got the TV because I was already playing Sword and Fairy 6 and was losing too much of the edges of the screen, and I was determined to keep playing it, enough so that I actually went to buy a new TV.  (Thankfully, it was a cheap one...)

    Anyway, top three of those are....

    At number three:

    And at number two:

    

    (To the extent that I've bought the doll I found of the secondary female character, and the Nendoroid of the heroine.  😁)

    And--drumroll please--the number one favorite of the year...!

    I've even bought all three of the Ooblets plushies released through Fangamer!  (And will likely buy every other Ooblets plushie they make...)

    And on that note, I'll bring this post to a long and rambling close.

🎉  Happy New Year! 🎉

Randomly....

     I have lately been watching the anime The Apothecary Diaries.  (Or rather, over the past four or five days I've binged the show, but as it's simulcasting that just means I've watched the first ten (or was it eleven?) episodes and caught up to its current status.)

    It's really good (so far), and obviously it must be doing well, because Goodsmile has pre-orders up for Nendoroids of the two leads, and a Pop-up Parade of the heroine.  Without knowing how the story will end, I'm not sure if I want to spring for all three, but I will probably have to get the Pop-up Parade because of the following weird brain logic.

    I was thinking about the figure and mentally commented to myself that the Pop-up Parade of Maomao might fit in nicely next to the Pop-up Parade of Wei Wuxian...and suddenly I found myself thinking how cool it would be if Maomao was the reincarnation of Wen Qing.

    So now I suddenly and totally headcanon that she is, in fact, the reincarnation of Wen Qing, and I kind of want to write a fanfic wherein Maomao meets the still-existing fierce corpse version of Wen Ning, who recognizes her as his sister, and he's thrilled to get to see her again after so many centuries.  I don't think I ever could write that, since The Apothecary Diaries is set in a much more realistic world without magic and monsters and the undead, but it could be a fun cross-over regardless of that.  (Uh, aside from the fact that it might be a little dubious to have a cross-over between an actual Chinese IP and a Japanese IP that's merely set in ancient China. (Okay, technically I don't know for a fact that The Apothecary Diaries is originally Japanese, but...I feel like if they were just adapting a Chinese novel or whatever then the characters would all have family names, and yet they don't, which is just really weird to me.  They all just have given names, unless Crunchyroll is purposefully screwing up the subtitles so that a whole lot of people with two single-character names are being treated as having one two-character names, which is equally implausible.  There's also the fact that if it was based on a Chinese novel or comic or whatever, then you'd expect a Chinese animation studio to be doing the adaptation, not a Japanese one.))

    Long story short, now that I've come to the weird brain conclusion that Maomao is Wen Qing, I almost feel obligated to buy the Pop-up Parade of her. 😅  (Especially since lately I've been putting together Nendoroid dolls to represent various other Mo Dao Zu Shi characters besides the two who have official rep, but I have not so far done one for Wen Qing.  Just Jiang Cheng, Jiang Yanli and Wen Ning.  I did spot a dress I could buy that would do for a Wen Qing Nendoroid doll, but finding a Nendoroid with hair that could do for Wen Qing is another matter entirely, and much more difficult to pull off.)

    On an unrelated note, some time ago, I reported on some crazy activity that seemed to be entirely one (or more?) bots loading my blog's main page over and over again.  And then later on I reported that the bot seemed to have moved on after more than 11,000 pageviews.

"So-n-so didn't do anything wrong!"

     Okay, so...this is sort of a fandom rant, but more about how fans sometimes relate to the characters than it is about any specific fandom.  (Though after the read more tag, I will be going heavy into MDZS spoilers, just to further drive home my point.)

    This is something that's been bothering me for a few weeks now, so it's been building up, and I wanted to let it out before it festers any more than it already has.

    So, I was introduced to the "didn't do anything wrong" subset of fan reactions indirectly; my brother was sharing a story that...I don't remember where it came from, as this was quite a few years ago now.  Main point of the story, though, was some female fan in all seriousness said, regarding the anime/manga Berserk, that "Griffith really didn't do anything wrong."  Griffith is the extremely pretty villain of Berserk, who started his villainy by literally sacrificing the hero's girlfriend in order to turn himself into a demon.  That is automatically doing something wrong, period, and I seem to recall my brother going on at great length about the other ghastly things Griffith did, but I don't recall any details, and that's not really the point:  just the human sacrifice is already something deeply wrong, especially if he had no mitigating factors to lessen the evil of the action.  (Case in point:  in the second season of a popular isekai anime, the hero sacrifices thousands to become a demon lord, but this act is somewhat mitigated because his reason to do so is that becoming a demon lord is the only way to restore the lives of his friends and subjects who were killed in a treacherous attack by an invading army, said invading army being of course the lives he sacrifices for the transformation.  Even with that mitigating factor, though, it still leaves the audience unsettled, because it's such a horrible thing he's just done, despite his good reasons for doing it.)  The overall sense I got of the "they didn't do anything wrong" fan reaction thus was that it really means "I am attracted to this character and therefore refuse to acknowledge their crimes."  Which is, in a word, not cool.

    So, fast-forward to sometime earlier this year (or maybe late last year?), when I saw someone on Etsy selling a mug that read "WWX didn't do anything wrong" and I honestly got kinda offended by it for two reasons.  First, "he didn't do anything wrong" is a line spoken by fans about villains, not heroes.  And second, it actively negates a large chunk of his character arc, because a large part of his growth as a person was when he realized that all his bad choices and wrong decisions had gotten people killed, including some people very close to him.  Now, in Wei Wuxian's case, it's certainly true that he tried to never do anything truly wrong:  he has a personal code of ethics that he doesn't violate, but that code of ethics does not conform to his society's code of ethics in all places (most of his peers view necromancy as pure evil) nor does it completely conform to the basic code of ethics most modern societies adhere to (we're not typically big on "you killed my family so I am going to kill you" logic, plus the whole necromancy thing), but he does attempt to do what he views as the right thing at all times.  (Unlike some villains about whom "he didn't do anything wrong" is said, who don't even care about right or wrong, and others have the policy "I want to do it, therefore it is right.")  However, when you're an angry teenager (or angry twenty year old) it's not always easy to tell which course is right even by your own personal code of ethics, and sometimes he made decisions that he later realized were wrong, despite that he hadn't thought so at the time.  Him coming to realize that was a major turning point for him as a character, so denying that it was ever wrong in the first place is trying to deny him that growth.

    Moving forward through time again to a few weeks ago, when I was looking at the wiki pages for a few of the Mo Dao Zu Shi characters, as I mentioned in another post.  In among the comments on one of the pages was someone stating, several times, that "JGY did nothing wrong."

    Jin Guangyao (initials JGY) is the villain of the novel.

    Claiming that he did nothing wrong is mind-numbing.  And, honestly, it cheapens both the fan and the character.  JGY is a complex character, and the motivations that led him into his increasingly evil activities are not initially wrong, per se.  What makes him a compelling villain is that his situation is actually deeply sympathetic, and it's hard to say precisely at what time he crosses the line that separates "justified" and "going way too far" in his pursuit of vengeance for all the wrongs that have been committed against him.  (This is also why the leads seem like they might not go all out on actually punishing him once he's fully lost, because they can see just how far he had been pushed, and how it had caused him to lash out in ways that he himself knew were wrong and could never be justified.)

    I think what really bothers me, though, is the entire "he didn't do anything wrong" mindset.  A well-written character is typically not going to be all good or all bad; a well-written character is typically going to be nuanced, and their actions will include both good and bad.  There are authors who have defied that who are lauded as among the greatest writers in their respective languages (specifically, Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo, who are both known for their characters typically being either pure good or pure evil (though even in their works there are exceptions)), but most writers, particularly in the modern era, tend towards having characters that are nuanced with shades of gray, meaning that very few of them can truly be said to have never done anything wrong.  That being the case, trying to deny their wrong-doing is actually discarding part of the character (in some cases, a very large part of the character!) thus doing an injustice to both the character and the fan.

    In short, every time I see someone say that, I just want to say to them "You know, there's nothing wrong with saying 'This character did some really awful things, but I can't help loving them anyway.'  The beauty of fiction is that, in the end, it's not real, so if you like a character despite their wicked ways, it's not harming anyone, but if you don't acknowledge that what they did was wrong then you're suggesting that you, yourself, have a questionable sense of morality."

    All that being said, I now feel compelled to actually outline just how few characters in Mo Dao Zu Shi can truly be said to have "done nothing wrong" as well as outlining all the things the other characters did that were wrong.  (Omitting really minor characters who only show up once or twice, people who we don't really know enough about.  Like Sisi and Bicao, for example.  Heck, I'm even leaving out Qin Su, because there are just too many gaps in what we know.)

IWSG: Final IWSG post of the year

 

Well, there's a creative title, eh? 😰

So...I'm sort of in a weird headspace right now.  In the final week of November, my heart palpitations flared up, not as badly as during the game jam that first started them, but badly enough to be worrying.  Consequently, I decided to take a few days off from writing after NaNo was over...and now I'm having trouble getting back into writing again.

I did at least manage to write a new outline (of sorts) to figure out where this massive thing I'm writing needs to go from here, but when I sat down yesterday to work on it...I just couldn't find any energy or impetus to actually start writing.

It's deeply frustrating, but I don't know what to do about it.

(As to the monthly question, it's sort of a non-starter for me:  I don't write reviews.  I mean, the question is ambiguous as to whether it means reviews on a store site or reviews on one's blog, but I don't do either.  I do sometimes put up blog posts with reactions to a book I've read, but they tend to be a rambling collection of my thoughts, useless to both writer and potential readers alike.  😰  Kind of a waste of everyone's time, really...but thankfully I don't do them all that often.)

That Old Malaise

It's a hard to describe feeling.

Like, if I try to communicate with anyone I'm going to snap at them and (try to) start an argument.

Not because I'm in any particularly bad mood, but just...because?

I can't really explain it because I don't really understand it, but I do at least recognize it.  It happens from time to time and I don't know any way to deal with it but to quietly let it pass, trying to avoid people as much as possible until it does.

That's why even though I've finally finished reading Heaven Official's Blessing (very impressed with her, btw:  she resisted the urge to find a way to shoehorn any explicit sex scenes in) I'm now scared to find a Discord server dedicated to MDZS (I know there's at least one such server) because I'm afraid I'll start acting like a jerk if I do.  (Which sucks, because I wanted to ask for advice on how to post a short fic to AO3, as I feel like my summary and tags will drive potential readers away, but I'm not sure how to fix them...)

This is very frustrating, but I can't do anything about it really.

At least I have this blog, which nobody reads (except sometimes for IWSG) making it the perfect soundless platform to vent my frustrations without annoying anyone or being misunderstood, because you can't be misunderstood when you're not heard.