Let me submit myself to the muse!Soooo I've basically been unable to force myself to write absolutely anything for basically a whole month. My RL has been pretty hectic lately for various reasons, but it seemed like the hectic-ness was, for a time, pushing me to be more productive, somehow. Now, I just feel like I've hit a wall... To quote Thomas Thorne, my beloathed: I have, as of late, been suffering a most torturous blockage. What once flowed freely, positively gushing out of me, somehow has ceased and now, for all my efforts, however hard I strain, nothing is produced. ...Yeah, I also disliked* the thinly-veiled blue balls joke they wrote into this segment. It's even worse in audio form. Go acquire the Ghosts: The Button House Archives book and audiobook if you want to hear how awful and terrible he is for yourself. I was actually hoping that pulling the quote from the book for this blog entry would inspire me into writing more of my Thomphrey fic, but no such luck... It might just be that I'm just not feeling as obsessive over Ghosts as I was when I started writing the fic. I tend to fixate on things pretty intensely for a while, but when I don't have a wider fandom to really interact with* the fixation can end up fading before I'm actually done with my creative projects... I know the solution here is obviously to rewatch the canon and get re-invested, but I promised myself that on my next rewatch I'd take notes for the meta and ship manifestos I'd like to write, and now I've kind of just made it into work for myself. I tend to prioritize having fun and relaxing when I'm doing fandom stuff, which is why I've been drifting more toward Kingdom Hearts, since I know I'm not really going to write anything more than very short oneshots and it's already a canon I'm familiar with. That, and I feel like I've been swinging more into a gaming mood than a reading and writing mood lately, too, which doesn't help much. I have been re-reading the Aubrey/Maturin series, starting with the first book, Master and Commander, of course, but even though I love it so much and I really admire O'Brian's prose... It's just not capturing my attention as much as it had been when I started re-reading the series. I've basically been reading it during downtimes where I would otherwise just be randomly scrolling on my phone (I've been in a lot of waiting rooms IRL lately, lol), but I haven't really been able to just sit with a book and read in my actual downtime. Lately, my brain just tends to wander too much while I try to read--- and I have so much stuff to overthink about and be stressed over recently that I think I just need to engage with hobbies that fully absorb my attention, like video games. It makes it a little harder to focus on a book I love so much, actually. I'm constnantly pausing to highlight shippy segments and squee in my head. The amount of times Jack and Stephen say things that make me go "oh my god why are you married already in book fucking one" is absurdly high. So, yeah, at the moment, a video game does a much better job of forcing me to be present and have a sole focus on chilling and having fun. I actually finished replaying Okami on the Switch a few months ago (just in time for the sequel to be announced, which I'm so so hyped for), and so I guess I just kinda feel inspired by both Kingdom Hearts and general PS2 aesthetics to work my way through more of the PS2 games I loved so much when they were the current-gen hotness. ...So I've started up Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy like some kind of nostalgia-poisoned rube. The platforming is. So slippery and yet so stiff. The camera controls. Are bad. I'm clipping through things. Far too often. The Daxter is. There. At least everyone has Anyway, I'm thankful that I can just relax and not pay much attention, since it is a goofy collect-a-thon mascot platformer and there's a zero chance of me shipping absolutely anything or ever wanting to do fandom activity based on this franchise. ( I will say the sound design in this game rules, though. Sound effects can be so repetitious sometimes, but I never get tired of Jak's hiya-ya-yahs and grunts, and the Precursor Orb pickup sound effects and Power Cell fanfare are extremely satisfying--- especially when you have Blue Eco's collectable-magnet effect and grab a bunch of them at once. The music is great, too. Nice unobtrusive ambient style tracks. It won't have you humming along the way Kingdom Hearts' music might, but instead it just peppers in a nice layer of mood-setting background music. (And I admit that the platforming does get much better once you get used to the control scheme, I'm just so used to Circle for jump) After a good three hours of playtime, I've basically 100%'d all the collectables currently possible in Geyser Rock, Sandover Village, Sentinel Beach, and Forbidden Jungle (barring the fishing minigame in the jungle--- I hate it ...And in doing all that, I've only encountered a scant few worrisome bugs! The most concerning of which was the map just... Not loading. I'm not sure if I'll write any other blog posts as I keep playing Jak & Daxter between CoM. I myself said aloud about Daxter that "He's way too quippy and sarcastic. It's like if Timon from The Lion King fucking sucked." But, yeah. It's a good game, no nostalgia goggles required. If you like very slightly janky PS2 adventure platformers and can tolerate a wisecracking sidekick character, you'll like this. I also recognize the humor in having Thomas' rant about lacking a muse in the same blogpost as the game where one of the first quests you get in the starting town is an artist literally looking for his lost muse... Next blog post will most likely be another update to my KH:CoM post after I finish Destiny Islands, but I also might force myself to ramble about Ghosts some more in the hopes that it inspires me to actually finish my fucking fic. See you then! I ended up 100%ing Jak & Daxter aside from the Blue Rings Power Cell that I didn't want to bother with. I really expected the game to get annoying at some point but it's such a solid game all the way through... Too bad they never made any sequels! Or any other games in the franchise! Ha ha! Good thing they never gave Jak a goatee and a gun and made him talk thus ruining their silent protag in a colorful fantasy world by creating dark and gritty followups! Ha ha! I'm so glad that never happened!
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Discombobulated
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I entered the big tower in the jungle and instead of being inside the tower (where the first plant boss is) I fell down into a black void where the landing pad was the only floor. I had to fall off of it and die in the void to respawn properly in the tower and reload the terrain. I'm just glad that dying in this game only amounts to the teeny slap on the wrist of a map reload.
