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CWs: food, ponderings on mortality, death, physical health, mental health, pet health

Well, our very chill book club on Discord decided on reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to start it up again after a long hiatus. I read it slower than I expected, but finished it last night. I hadn’t read it since undergrad, so it was definitely a different experience 20+ years later. IIRC, I read it when I was barely learning anything about Classics, so I didn’t pick up on a lot of things (the references to Paracelsus, for example, but I guess he’s more of an alchemist or occultist than anything). The book has some really stunningly beautiful imagery; Shelley does a wonderful job with describing travel and landscapes. I also had no idea that a stretch of the Thames is called the Isis, apparently out of a mistaken etymology; Shelley references that and it did not make sense at all to me until I looked it up. Also, you’ll find some more archaic definitions used, such as “to devote” meaning “to curse” (< Lat. devovere, “to curse, execrate” vs. the more common meaning “to vow, devote; promise solemnly, vow”), so that was interesting. Context helped with that.

I was reading something recently on Mastodon and the post was talking about how websites and webdesign used to be all about intrinsic motivation (creativity, inspiration, etc.) rather than extrinsic (money, side hustle, &c.). And I definitely feel like something’s been lost over time, but some people are trying to reclaim and restore that past ethos.

I’m writing this on a very snowy day, reminiscent of one of the areas in the game I’m about to discuss. I wrote a little blurb elsewhere on here awhile ago (I can’t remember if it was in a post on RPGs, or retro videogames, &c.), but thought this deserved its own entry. Rarely is this far from my mind. I’m talking about a videogame called Ihatovo Monogatari, or Stories of Ihatovo. It came out in 1993 on the Super Famicom (Super Nintendo elsewhere), but never received a release outside of Japan. In 2017/18, I discovered video game fan translations, and started looking for any and all I could find, especially on the NES and SNES. And believe me, I found quite a few over the years. There are some real gems which never made it to the US, and while that’s really sad, I’m happy translators graciously made them playable for English-speaking audiences. I had played the fabled Radical Dreamers fan translation in ~2005, and loved it, but that was really a one-off; I only sought it out because of the Chrono Cross connection, and didn’t look into any other games until, as I mentioned, many years later.

CWs: holidays, physical & mental health, finances, work, food, oblique politics, religion

CWs: mental health, holidays

Now some of you may be asking, what the hell does “scrobble” mean? Well, it’s a nonsense word for the most part, but it means “to submit your currently playing song to a service which tracks your listening history.” Back in the early 2000s (2002 per a search just now), a service spun up called Audioscrobbler. The idea was that you’d play music, and your music player would send metadata about the song you were playing to Audioscrobbler’s site, and eventually it would build up a sort of personal listening profile of you. You could share it with friends and say “hey, look at all the cool music I listen to! You should too!” or whatever. Or you could learn about others’ music taste in turn, and discover new artists. It all started out very inauspiciously and homebrew, very chill. Eventually the venture capitalists and music industry took notice, and well, y’all know what that means. It became corporate and boring and annoying. The service rebranded as Last.fm, which was a more suitable name for the service, probably, but it was never the same. I don’t like it anymore.