Roundup

[jaggedwolf]

Finished watching The Last Dance, which was a great documentary about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls - I knew basically nothing about MJ other than Space Jam going in, and the documentary was pretty good at setting context.

My Jedi Academy save crapped out on me and instead of loading from an earlier save, I took this as a sign that I should playing this 2003 game. I am now 8.5 hours into Disco Elysium with minimal prior knowledge and an uncharacteristic refusal to look things up. The latter is getting bolstered by an increasingly strong feeling that there isn't going to be a "good" ending anyway, so I can just be the shitter I'm destined to be, dodging political questions and staring at footprints.

The Adventure Zone: Balance

I finally finished it, only took me like three years. My final verdict is Taako ≈ Merle >>> Magnus. This podcast's goof/seriousness ratio and transitions between the two meant that it was very difficult to take any of Magnus's apparently earnest heroics seriously, but I could buy Taako's selfish focus on himself and his people and Merle's half-hearted gestures towards doing good. Also, because I am that dweeb who hates when athletes argue with referees, I additionally hate it when there's incredibly obvious dice lying and the reddit graphs back up that observation.

Lup is dope. I was somehow sold on from the moment Griffin gave that speech about Taako remembering her and that he hadn't been alone all those years. Lucretia's backstory being that she wiped all her friend's memories to cut off the other planes is super metal...but pretty weakened by the fact that apparently no one ever thought of using the Light directly against the Hunger until the finale.

Don't think I'm going to listen to any more TAZ stuff. It's kind of a weirdly similar situation to the Hades game, where I'm glad to have listened/played the canon, but didn't end up having much of an emotional attachment to the narrative/characters by the end of it. I will take any recs for Lup/Lucretia fic though, because I have consistently simple tastes.

Writing

I wrote a couple of fics for Starship Iris week, one for Violet and one for Park. I'm enjoying S2 so far, and posting reactions on Tumblr. I do mourn the loss of timeline consistency, statements about Juniper Liu's age have thrown a wrench into things.

Recs

There has been so much good Starship Iris art lately! A few favourites below.

Stressed undergrad Violet

Sana playing guitar on the hammock

General Frederick getting surprised in the S1 finale

Sana and a tiger

Random Links

Perseverance landed on Mars! I enjoyed this post about how its landing site was chosen, and this video explaining how the helicopter will fly and stay functional.

Comments

[st_aurafina]

I do mourn the loss of timeline consistency, statements about Juniper Liu's age have thrown a wrench into things.

Oh no, I didn't twig to this - how old did they say? S2 is great (but they recast Campbell, and I don't think the voice suits him as much, he sounds less gruff. Campbell needs to be gruff.)

[jaggedwolf]

I don't have strong Campbell voice opinions but yeah, definitely noticed the difference. He does sound less worn down than S1 Campbell.

They mentioned Juniper being 22 in S2E1 and this episode reiterates that with McCabe's indignance at Juniper being called a baby anything because she's less than a year younger than them. That's fine, but this episode also had Violet claim that the age difference between her and Juniper is 4 years - that would make Violet 26, which doesn't line up with her graduating from undergrad in '85 and the show currently taking place in '91, or her birth year in the first vignette. My fannish solution to this is just ignoring the stated age difference and assuming it's actually six years, because that doesn't cause cascading changes down the line :D

[jaggedwolf]

I...may have spent too much time calculating the timeline over here: jaggedwolf.neocities.org/tscosi/timeline.html