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Nov. 9th, 2025 11:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thedarlingoneSome things I've been doing or working on...
* The new Zelda game, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, dropped this past Thursday. It's a Switch2 exclusive, so I wasn't going to play it myself, but I was excited to watch a playthrough. My hopes weren't terribly high, because the previous game in this style (Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity), which is arguably my favorite video game, mainly grabbed me by being an Everybody Lives AU of Breathe of the Wild and handling the thematic implications of that choice fucking perfectly -- in my opinion, of course. Players from outside transformative fandom generally objected to the whole concept, so Age of Imprisonment is strictly canon-bound and imo suffers for it, most especially at the end where the "twist" against what seemed to be foreshadowed about one new character's fate is in my opinion a massive thematic misstep.
There seems to be a wide gap between players who followed the foreshadowing and didn't actually realize there was a twist, and people who (like me) have a good enough eye for Hyrule's skyline to put everything together -- including remembering, from another stream I'd watched, the single piece of foreshadowing that exists for the *real* fate of that character, which is exclusive to the Switch 2 edition of Tears of the Kingdom when you play using the Nintendo Online app's "Zelda Notes" feature connected via your phone and visit a specific in-game location.
Anyway, that was unexpectedly depressing and I wound up crying over it and then winding up with a migraine the next day which didn't help.
* I recently picked up an off-brand Xbox controller so I can play Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (that is, the version that covers the first six movies) on my laptop via Steam, since the PC port's keyboard controls are absolutely horrendous and make the game nearly physically unplayable with human-style hands. Thankfully, Steam now has a toggle to remap the buttons on any controller into Nintendo conformation, which allows me to use my muscle memory from some thousands of hours in Animal Crossing rather than having to hit B first every time I try to hit A.
I'm having fun, more or less, I think? But each mission is really fucking long, the game only saves at the end of a mission (or when you do a couple of specific things in the hub), and you have to play each mission at least three times for full 100%, *and* I really fucking abhor the vehicle controls and the way the camera is neither fixed nor free -- it swivels around based on player position in a deeply motion-sickening way. So I don't know how far through it I'm going to get. I am trying to work on my platforming a bit more, because it requires some timed button presses to make the more horizontal double-jumps, and I'm very unskilled at platforming or timed button presses.
* I have reconstructed a childhood nostalgia recipe I thought was lost for good! I've been researching it for a while, since I wrote it into our current longfic when we needed a unique nostalgia food for an amnesiac character, and last night I finally put it all together and cooked it up, and it worked! I did the thing where you taste it and put in more of this and that, which I've never done before, flavor profiles not being a big feature of how I learned to cook. I'm so proud of myself.
Yavin Til Stew, aka lentils in Hawaiian-style sweet-and-sour sauce
1 15oz can cooked lentils, drained
1 8oz can tomato sauce
about ½ can (about 1 cup) canned pineapple, chunk or crushed, drained
2-3 Tbsp peanut butter, chunky or creamy (roughly golfball-sized blob)
¼ cup brown sugar, packed
¼ cup soy sauce
¼ cup lemon juice
Put all ingredients in 2-quart or larger saucepan. Mix well. On stovetop, bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Reduce to a simmer and continue stirring. A slight whitish film of oil will come to the surface; this is the peanut oil cooking. When the whitish film disappears, the stew is ready. It will thicken on standing/cooling. Serve over rice, or with naan or another grain-based side of your preference. Makes about 4 cups of stew.
Notes: Choose between chunk or crushed pineapple and crunchy or creamy peanut butter based on your own texture preferences. I haven't tested using dry lentils or substituting nut butters or acids (such as a cooking vinegar instead of lemon juice). I also don't have a kitchen scale to provide equivalents in grams.
* I keep pondering whether to pick up Elden Ring when it next goes on sale just before Christmas, which you'd think would be a clear "no" given that I'm struggling with Lego Star Wars and have never beaten a Pokemon game despite owning four of them, and also I have a fairly intense body horror squick. Plus it's usually $35 even on Steam sale, which is a chunk of change. I'm having trouble articulating the draw to myself. But... I don't know. It's pretty, it's large, I've mostly gotten the hang of BotW dodging which is a much simplified inspired-by version (technically Elden Ring was inspired by BotW to do the "pretty open world with crafting material pickups" deal, but BotW's combat draws materially from previous games in Elden Ring's genre, the Dark Souls/Bloodborne or "soulsborne" genre)... where was I?
Right. And it's honest about being fuckoff hard. Like most soulsbornes, it starts with a scripted death to get you used to the idea that death is not the end. I honestly think a big part of why I get so so very frustrated with Pokemon especially is that it sells itself as "oh it's an easy game for little kids" and then it repeatedly kicks my ass because (1) I haven't been playing it since I was ten like most people my age, so I didn't develop my knowledge of the mechanics as the franchise grew and now it's massively overcomplicated, and (2) it actually, I will die on this hill, is designed to have the same gameplay loop as a soulsborne: you walk into a boss battle, you die, you learn from the experience and make a new plan and come back stronger.
Pokemon fans, at least on Tumblr (I don't know many elsewhere), have utter shitfits when I say this. Apparently it's heresy that a children's video game might be trying to teach you life skills like patience and perseverance instead of being inherently fun and easy and welcoming and impossible for me to actually struggle with unless I've somehow failed to notice that the Electric gym told me to bring Ground types. (If you are not a Pokemon player it may be useful to note that, while pure Electric types are weak to Ground, most Electric gym leaders include dual-types or even non-Electric types that are immune to and/or supereffective against Ground, so the gyms deliberately set you up to fail on your first try.)
Anyway. I only figured that out recently and by now I'm too frustrated by the entire opposite-of-git-gud culture around Pokemon to give it a fair shake on the new premise. But I do think it would probably be good for me to tackle a game that I *know* will kick my ass repeatedly until I learn the skills for each boss, as a deliberate challenge against my first-try perfectionism.
So, as part of trying to figure out whether I'd enjoy Elden Ring, I've been watching a 100% video guide series that gets as much dialogue as possible and lets all the cutscenes play -- as noted above re the Ages of Calamity and Imprisonment, I tend to prefer seeing how a game's story goes before I pick it up. Of all the games I've bought on launch day, none of them have become favorites. I'm about two-thirds of the way through the series, which is some 50+ hours long because Elden Ring is a very large game, and because the series is mainly focused on guiding people to be able to 100% the game even if they don't have the reflexes to "git gud" (which I may not either! I have noticed while practicing my BotW/TotK dodges that I have demonstrably slow reflexes; if I use the dodge timing cues built into TotK, I'm consistently late)... where was I again? Right. So this guide uses a very overpowered build created by showing exactly where to sneak into high-level areas to get better equipment without dying, and demonstrating how to coax a couple of high-level bosses to fall off cliffs and give you good XP. So the fights are usually over in a hit or two, except the ones with main story bosses. And I'm definitely noticing that I think I wouldn't enjoy playing like that, that I actively want to try the fights out more... fairly and see if I can actually learn them. Course, I might wind up playing for three hours and then never touching it again, but that's always a possibility.
* My birthday is coming up later this month, and I can't remember if I linked my Amazon wishlist here or not. No pressure, but if anyone is interested in getting me something useful that I don't have yet, these are all things I'd really like but haven't quite gotten around to buying for myself. (I also need a rice cooker, but I haven't figured out an exact model, and also the ones from brand names I recognize as reliable are terrifyingly expensive to ask for. "Small" and "with settings for multiple kinds of rice" are my top features there.)
* The new Zelda game, Hyrule Warriors: Age of Imprisonment, dropped this past Thursday. It's a Switch2 exclusive, so I wasn't going to play it myself, but I was excited to watch a playthrough. My hopes weren't terribly high, because the previous game in this style (Hyrule Warriors: Age of Calamity), which is arguably my favorite video game, mainly grabbed me by being an Everybody Lives AU of Breathe of the Wild and handling the thematic implications of that choice fucking perfectly -- in my opinion, of course. Players from outside transformative fandom generally objected to the whole concept, so Age of Imprisonment is strictly canon-bound and imo suffers for it, most especially at the end where the "twist" against what seemed to be foreshadowed about one new character's fate is in my opinion a massive thematic misstep.
There seems to be a wide gap between players who followed the foreshadowing and didn't actually realize there was a twist, and people who (like me) have a good enough eye for Hyrule's skyline to put everything together -- including remembering, from another stream I'd watched, the single piece of foreshadowing that exists for the *real* fate of that character, which is exclusive to the Switch 2 edition of Tears of the Kingdom when you play using the Nintendo Online app's "Zelda Notes" feature connected via your phone and visit a specific in-game location.
Anyway, that was unexpectedly depressing and I wound up crying over it and then winding up with a migraine the next day which didn't help.
* I recently picked up an off-brand Xbox controller so I can play Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga (that is, the version that covers the first six movies) on my laptop via Steam, since the PC port's keyboard controls are absolutely horrendous and make the game nearly physically unplayable with human-style hands. Thankfully, Steam now has a toggle to remap the buttons on any controller into Nintendo conformation, which allows me to use my muscle memory from some thousands of hours in Animal Crossing rather than having to hit B first every time I try to hit A.
I'm having fun, more or less, I think? But each mission is really fucking long, the game only saves at the end of a mission (or when you do a couple of specific things in the hub), and you have to play each mission at least three times for full 100%, *and* I really fucking abhor the vehicle controls and the way the camera is neither fixed nor free -- it swivels around based on player position in a deeply motion-sickening way. So I don't know how far through it I'm going to get. I am trying to work on my platforming a bit more, because it requires some timed button presses to make the more horizontal double-jumps, and I'm very unskilled at platforming or timed button presses.
* I have reconstructed a childhood nostalgia recipe I thought was lost for good! I've been researching it for a while, since I wrote it into our current longfic when we needed a unique nostalgia food for an amnesiac character, and last night I finally put it all together and cooked it up, and it worked! I did the thing where you taste it and put in more of this and that, which I've never done before, flavor profiles not being a big feature of how I learned to cook. I'm so proud of myself.
Yavin Til Stew, aka lentils in Hawaiian-style sweet-and-sour sauce
1 15oz can cooked lentils, drained
1 8oz can tomato sauce
about ½ can (about 1 cup) canned pineapple, chunk or crushed, drained
2-3 Tbsp peanut butter, chunky or creamy (roughly golfball-sized blob)
¼ cup brown sugar, packed
¼ cup soy sauce
¼ cup lemon juice
Put all ingredients in 2-quart or larger saucepan. Mix well. On stovetop, bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Reduce to a simmer and continue stirring. A slight whitish film of oil will come to the surface; this is the peanut oil cooking. When the whitish film disappears, the stew is ready. It will thicken on standing/cooling. Serve over rice, or with naan or another grain-based side of your preference. Makes about 4 cups of stew.
Notes: Choose between chunk or crushed pineapple and crunchy or creamy peanut butter based on your own texture preferences. I haven't tested using dry lentils or substituting nut butters or acids (such as a cooking vinegar instead of lemon juice). I also don't have a kitchen scale to provide equivalents in grams.
* I keep pondering whether to pick up Elden Ring when it next goes on sale just before Christmas, which you'd think would be a clear "no" given that I'm struggling with Lego Star Wars and have never beaten a Pokemon game despite owning four of them, and also I have a fairly intense body horror squick. Plus it's usually $35 even on Steam sale, which is a chunk of change. I'm having trouble articulating the draw to myself. But... I don't know. It's pretty, it's large, I've mostly gotten the hang of BotW dodging which is a much simplified inspired-by version (technically Elden Ring was inspired by BotW to do the "pretty open world with crafting material pickups" deal, but BotW's combat draws materially from previous games in Elden Ring's genre, the Dark Souls/Bloodborne or "soulsborne" genre)... where was I?
Right. And it's honest about being fuckoff hard. Like most soulsbornes, it starts with a scripted death to get you used to the idea that death is not the end. I honestly think a big part of why I get so so very frustrated with Pokemon especially is that it sells itself as "oh it's an easy game for little kids" and then it repeatedly kicks my ass because (1) I haven't been playing it since I was ten like most people my age, so I didn't develop my knowledge of the mechanics as the franchise grew and now it's massively overcomplicated, and (2) it actually, I will die on this hill, is designed to have the same gameplay loop as a soulsborne: you walk into a boss battle, you die, you learn from the experience and make a new plan and come back stronger.
Pokemon fans, at least on Tumblr (I don't know many elsewhere), have utter shitfits when I say this. Apparently it's heresy that a children's video game might be trying to teach you life skills like patience and perseverance instead of being inherently fun and easy and welcoming and impossible for me to actually struggle with unless I've somehow failed to notice that the Electric gym told me to bring Ground types. (If you are not a Pokemon player it may be useful to note that, while pure Electric types are weak to Ground, most Electric gym leaders include dual-types or even non-Electric types that are immune to and/or supereffective against Ground, so the gyms deliberately set you up to fail on your first try.)
Anyway. I only figured that out recently and by now I'm too frustrated by the entire opposite-of-git-gud culture around Pokemon to give it a fair shake on the new premise. But I do think it would probably be good for me to tackle a game that I *know* will kick my ass repeatedly until I learn the skills for each boss, as a deliberate challenge against my first-try perfectionism.
So, as part of trying to figure out whether I'd enjoy Elden Ring, I've been watching a 100% video guide series that gets as much dialogue as possible and lets all the cutscenes play -- as noted above re the Ages of Calamity and Imprisonment, I tend to prefer seeing how a game's story goes before I pick it up. Of all the games I've bought on launch day, none of them have become favorites. I'm about two-thirds of the way through the series, which is some 50+ hours long because Elden Ring is a very large game, and because the series is mainly focused on guiding people to be able to 100% the game even if they don't have the reflexes to "git gud" (which I may not either! I have noticed while practicing my BotW/TotK dodges that I have demonstrably slow reflexes; if I use the dodge timing cues built into TotK, I'm consistently late)... where was I again? Right. So this guide uses a very overpowered build created by showing exactly where to sneak into high-level areas to get better equipment without dying, and demonstrating how to coax a couple of high-level bosses to fall off cliffs and give you good XP. So the fights are usually over in a hit or two, except the ones with main story bosses. And I'm definitely noticing that I think I wouldn't enjoy playing like that, that I actively want to try the fights out more... fairly and see if I can actually learn them. Course, I might wind up playing for three hours and then never touching it again, but that's always a possibility.
* My birthday is coming up later this month, and I can't remember if I linked my Amazon wishlist here or not. No pressure, but if anyone is interested in getting me something useful that I don't have yet, these are all things I'd really like but haven't quite gotten around to buying for myself. (I also need a rice cooker, but I haven't figured out an exact model, and also the ones from brand names I recognize as reliable are terrifyingly expensive to ask for. "Small" and "with settings for multiple kinds of rice" are my top features there.)
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Date: 2025-11-10 05:36 pm (UTC)Aw, I'm sorry. *hugs*