Trabia Garden

More AI: The Somnium Files: nirvanA Initiative! I've just finished Gen's Somnium.

You never know whether this game is going to give you dick jokes or philosophical lectures. It's a real rollercoaster.


( Notes on AI: The Somnium Files: nirvanA Initiative. )


I wish real cooking just involved pressing the right sequence of buttons on a controller. I'm okay at that. I'm a disaster at cooking.

I tried to make soup a few days ago. The recipe said it took twenty minutes to make; it took me an hour and a half. I used a frying pan instead of a saucepan, I boiled it instead of simmering, and I think I burnt myself on a wooden spoon.

('I just burnt myself on something, but I don't know what it was. There are a lot of hot things around, but I don't think it was any of them,' I said, bewildered. My housemates laughed at me.)

'I apologise for everything that's happened here,' I said, serving the soup up. Seconds later: 'I forgot spoons.'

'There's another loo past baggage reclaim,' my mum points out.

'Yes, of course there are Toulouse,' I say.

I am escorted out of France.


Over the weekend, I attended my brother Joseph's wedding! In France, which was experiencing an intense heatwave.

'Thank you all for joining us for our wedding in Hell,' Joseph greeted us in his speech. It was nearly 40°C. He turned to his bride. 'Eleanor, you're looking incredible. I think we can all agree that there are two extreme heat events in the south of France today.'

Shakira's 'Whenever, Wherever' played at the end of the ceremony, as the bride and groom walked up the aisle together. Incredible choice.

Joseph and Eleanor were told to feed each other the first bite of wedding cake 'gently and lovingly' and just mashed it into each other's faces simultaneously. They both had the same idea independently and have no idea who struck first. Truly made for each other.

Prior to the wedding, we were staying near a mountain that had the same name as my dad. Mum suggested that we climb it.

Dad: You want to climb to the top of the mountain?
Mum: I feel we should, as it's your name.
Dad: Bloody lucky I'm not called Everest.

Our flight back was cancelled, so we were trapped in Toulouse for two days, but there are worse places to be trapped! It gave us the opportunity to have a meal with the newlyweds, and I spent some time reading in a nice little park - the Parc du Grand Noble - which had avenues of trees and an interesting fountain you could stand inside. If you went there in the morning, you could see rabbits; they seemed to live under the wooden walkways.

There was a lot of cool wildlife on this trip, actually! I hadn't seen hummingbird hawk-moths before, and they're fascinatingly strange; they're moths that look like hummingbirds. I had seen scarce swallowtails before, but they're still very cool; they're butterflies with wings that seem to be set backwards and have false antennae at the bottom, to confuse predators, so they look upside-down when they're feeding on flowers. A lot of little lizards, one of which crawled onto Eleanor's hand during the wedding meal, and she was so excited she went around the tables to show everyone her new friend.

At one point we caught a glimpse of wild boar piglets trotting across the road; they were little and stripy and cute as hell. A bat fluttered over and over my head, drawing constant restless figures-of-eight against the dusk sky. We watched house martins flitting into their nests in the eaves; we watched swallows blizzarding around a town square. I'd never seen birds move like that: flying around in large numbers, but all moving as individuals, not as a flock.

As a final note, two different people at the wedding introduced themselves to me with 'HI, I'M INTO FANFICTION AND I WAS TOLD TO TALK TO YOU.' It was pretty great.

With the slight easing of restrictions, my family were able to have a socially distanced Easter meal in the sunshine, which was lovely!

This was the first time we'd been able to gather since the last-minute cancellation of Christmas, so we were finally able to exchange presents, and my brother gave me 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim may have hit a new record for time from 'I'm hitting "New Game"' to 'I have no idea what's going on'.


( Notes on 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, up to the end of Megumi Yakushiji's prologue. )


I didn't know anything about this game when I started, and now I'm three hours in and I still don't.

Perhaps predictably, I've fallen extremely into Persona 4 Golden. It's a good time to have a massive JRPG to distract myself, really. I can understand the 'oh, you can't see your family at Christmas after all' rule change, of course, but I'm still a bit down about it.

(It'd also be nice if the government had informed us of this, you know, more than a week before Christmas. My parents bought a huge turkey on the assumption their kids would be visiting! It's not going to fit in the freezer; they're going to have to eat it themselves!)

Anyway! Yes. Persona 4.

'Yosuke appreciates you!' the game informed me after I helped him out in class. I'm extremely charmed. I appreciate you too, Yosuke!

I keep thinking 'I've got to get some studying done' and then just dating Yosuke instead.

I love the uncertain 'Eat it...?' prompt when I find expired food in the fridge.

I hope we can introduce Yosuke to Nanako. She's Junes's biggest fan; he's part of the family that owns Junes; let's get them to talk! (Update: we do get them to meet! It's pretty endearing. I'm glad Nanako could have a nice day with us and our friends after being let down.)

Yosuke caught me with Marie and he's JEALOUS. He demanded to know who she was and then, when I said she was an acquaintance, introduced himself to her with 'I'm Yosuke Hanamura. I'm his friend. His partner, y'know.'

I can't wait to spend an entire Persona game furious that I can't make out with a boy again.

'Whoa, you can cook? Well, you do seem to be great with your hands - um, never mind.' I CAN'T BELIEVE THIS

Nanako running to hide behind me when she's embarrassed is adorable.

Dojima's casting aspersions on my friends! This is an outrage!

Dojima... possibly suspects me of multiple murders? But also he seems cool with me continuing to live with him and his daughter. Thanks?

I'm slightly concerned by how much time Nanako seems to spend alone. Not just at home, either; she ran into me and Chie when she was wandering around outside by herself!

Yosuke asked me which was my type out of Yukiko and Chie. I said, 'Neither,' and I got the narration 'You told Yosuke your true feelings' and a courage boost. Why would telling my male friend I'm not attracted to either of our female friends require courage, unless...

Kanji: gay and pissed off about it? He seems like he has the potential to be an enjoyable character, although that might just be my weakness for terrible angry teenagers talking.

Wait, is Kanji canonically gay? Not sure I trust this game to handle that well, but we'll see.

Yes, Kanji's story is... not especially well handled, but I do love awful angry teenagers struggling with their sexuality and I hope he joins our party.

noooooo, Yosuke's crying

(I say 'noooooo' but am in fact incredibly pleased by this. Sorry, Yosuke.)

I'm on holiday for a couple of weeks now, and there's legally nothing to do. It is going to be extremely difficult to resist playing this game every second of the day.

Someone on Tumblr asked me to comment on the accuracy of an article called 'Your Guide to Not Getting Murdered in a Quaint English Village', and my answer included a story I don't think I've told here before, so I thought I'd reproduce it.

At the risk of sounding like a braggart, I’ve been to a few English villages and come back alive, so I may know a little on the topic.

First, the example list of village names: ‘Womble Hollow or Shrimpling or Pickles-in-the-Woods or Nasty Bottom or Wombat-on-Sea’. Very accurate. Actual English place names I’ve seen road signs pointing to: Six Mile Bottom, Giggleswick, Wigglesworth, Swaffham Bulbeck and Westward Ho! (exclamation point included).

The article neglects to mention what you should do if the village has a homemade scarecrow in every front garden, but there are no people to be seen. My family and I have experienced this. Get out. Get out immediately.

‘If you enter a town while the fête is happening, you are already dead.’ Not necessarily true. I went to a village fête once. It was nice. It was perfectly normal. A man dueted on a song called ‘Stick Your Finger up My Arse’ with a Henry Hoover.

‘Just remove water as a category.’ Good advice. As a child, I got my arm caught under a big rock on a Devon beach. All the locals gathered around me to shake their heads and say, ‘Tide’s coming in,’ with a sort of solemn enjoyment of the scene.

When other efforts to free me had failed, my dad went to the car and got an axe out of the boot. I distinctly remember being a child, my arm caught under a rock, the tide coming in, and my father approaching with an enormous axe.

His plan, it turned out, was to use the handle to lever the rock off my arm. I was permitted to keep my limbs.

Then a police officer turned up, looked at the axe in my father’s hands and said, ‘That’s a funny thing to bring to the beach, sir.’

It is possible, come to think of it, that my father is the murderer you need to avoid.

Puzzling autopilot malfunction recently: sitting on the loo, I took off my socks, neatly tucked one inside the other, and tossed them into the bathroom bin.

I think in my head I was changing my sanitary towel.


I watched Your Name for a third time, started crying approximately one second in, and was a sobbing mess over the closing credits. (Fortunately, I did most of my crying at the start and end; I was a little afraid at first that I'd just be bawling non-stop for the full two hours.)

It's my favourite film; I think it always will be. Nothing else has ever hit me in quite the same way. I've never wished for a sequel, or gone looking for fanfiction; it's absolutely self-contained and absolutely perfect.

I mentioned my passion for this film to my housemates afterwards.

Ginger: I've never seen Your Name.
Riona: Did we not watch it as a household?
Ginger: I don't think so. I remember we watched... er, it's not called Mambo No. 5.
(long pause)
Riona: I really want to know what you're thinking of.
(long pause)
Ginger: Big Hero 6.


Dontnod, the developers of Life Is Strange, have put out a trailer for a new game: Tell Me Why, due out in summer 2020.

It's another game about siblings! You're spoiling me, Dontnod! In fact, it's about identical twins, one of whom is trans, which seems like an interesting dynamic. Apparently it's the first ever trans protagonist from a major videogame developer.

It's a Microsoft exclusive, unfortunately. This is very much a Sony household, and I doubt my laptop has the power to run it. But Ginger's also intrigued by the concept and has a gaming laptop, so I'll probably end up watching them play.

(I can't believe the last instalment of Life Is Strange 2 is out in eighteen days. I'll never be ready. I'm far too invested in Sean and Daniel, and I really hope I can get a good ending for these boys.)


Coming back to the opening of this entry: if you have any stories of bizarre things you've caught yourself doing while your mind was elsewhere, I'd love to hear them!

I look forward so much to new Life Is Strange 2 episodes, and then when they arrive I always find myself going 'WAIT NO I'M NOT READY FOR THIS.'

I've reached the church in episode four, but I haven't yet gone inside. Here are my notes so far!


( Life Is Strange 2, episode four, up to approaching the church. )


I owe so much to whatever person at Dontnod went 'okay, we're catering specifically to Riona's fictional interests with this one; let's make a game that focuses on a teenager's relationship with his brother, and then let's physically and psychologically break that teenager as hard as we can.'

Someone anonymously did incredible fanart for The Worst Kind of Debt, my Your Turn to Die fic! I begged them for some way to give them proper credit, and they responded; they're lightcall on Deviantart. Here's their piece for the fic:




Look at that atmosphere! Look at the echoes of the game's visual style! I couldn't be more thrilled.

(I showed this to Rei's girlfriend, and her response was, 'Yes, this looks like something you would write. They look very sad.')


Two tales of Hampton Court I learnt recently:

- When Rei's girlfriend was eleven, she and her cousin Cordelia went to Hampton Court and watched a parade, with actors playing Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Her cousin introduced herself to Henry VIII as Cordelia. Henry VIII asked, 'Oh, like in King Lear?' Rei's girlfriend was FURIOUS. 'You don't know about King Lear! It hasn't been written yet! It's post-Elizabethan! You were dead by then!'

- On the train, I met a retired gardener who'd worked on the Hampton Court grounds for forty years, and I asked if he had any stories. Apparently he'd once accidentally turned on the sprinkler jets and flooded the hedge maze when it was full of people. An hour later his supervisor came over to ask exactly what had happened, and he demonstrated what he'd done and flooded the maze again, soaking a fresh batch of tourists.

On the summer solstice, a young prince named Zuko entered our home.




I'm not sure we've named him appropriately. Kitten Zuko is extremely chill. I'm used to new cats hiding for a couple of days, but Zuko hid for four hours and was purring happily on my lap by hour five. He'll say hello to anyone who visits. Kitten Zuko doesn't give a shit about anything. His namesake, Prince Zuko of Avatar: The Last Airbender, gives every possible shit.

They can both control fire, though.




We got Zuko to keep our tabby Dipper company after the loss of his sister Mabel. Dipper was a bit alarmed by this miniature cat at first, but I think he's starting to warm up to the newcomer; he was grooming Zuko yesterday. He's a lot more confused than he was pre-Zuko, but he's definitely less lonely. I hope I'll have pictures of the two of them together to share before too long!

Christmas dinner with my family:

Eleanor's mother: Do you need stuffing, Riona?
Riona: That would be lovely, thank you.
Riona's parents: (both start sniggering)

Thanks, guys.

We had a cake after the meal, and the box had the most incredible instructions:

SERVING: Place cake on a flat surface. Heat a long-bladed knife under warm water. Slice in a vertical direction. Turn cake and slice again in a vertical direction to create wedge shaped portions. Clean knife blade between slices.

Thank goodness. Far too many cakes expect you to be able to eat them without clear directions. I keep trying to slice horizontally.


I've been consuming a fair few things over the Christmas period, so here's a scattered entry about assorted media!


- Into the Spider-Verse reignited my taste for 'thirty-eight-year-old dirtbag accidentally bonds with a kid' stories, so I rewatched About a Boy. I really loved this film in my teens. There was a long period where I owned exactly four films on DVD; three of them were High School Musical, and the other was About a Boy. (I think I now also own Mulan.) It still holds up, I think, although the voiceovers of the characters' thoughts feel a bit dated. I love how Will gradually, reluctantly becomes used to Marcus's presence in his life.

It's really made me want an AU of Into the Spider-Verse where Peter B is the Peter Parker of Miles's universe. Miles goes HELP, PLEASE TEACH ME TO USE THESE POWERS, SPIDER-MAN and Spider-Man goes 'you're on your own, kid' and Miles sneakily follows him to find out where he lives and goes 'hey, I'm here now, in your non-superhero life, please teach me' and Peter goes 'what the fuck'.


- I also rewatched Zootopia, released under the inferior name of Zootropolis in the UK. I don't think I ever posted about it on here, but it's such a cute, fun film, and the worldbuilding is so interesting, and also it made me ship the hell out of a fox and a rabbit, whoops. HE LOOKS AT HER SO FONDLY.

There is, let's be honest, a definite possibility that I'm a furry.


- I finished Gris today; it's a gorgeous little watercolour-style game about a grieving young woman learning to stand on her feet again. 'Literally and figuratively bringing colour back to the world' is something I've had a weakness for ever since Okami. I'd recommend it if you're interested in light platforming and painting-esque animation. (I'll admit I found it sort of hilarious that your options at the beginning were 'walk very slowly' or 'FALL TO YOUR KNEES IN AGONY', and there were two different 'fall to your knees in agony' buttons.)

One thing that really struck me was how good it was at teaching you its mechanics without ever outright telling you anything.


- Spyro the Dragon was my introduction to 3D gaming; my only previous experience of games was on the Master System II and the Game Boy. I went over to a primary-school classmate's house, and I watched her play this game, and I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. It was the first thing I bought when my brother got a PS2 for his tenth birthday.

For my Christmas present to myself, I bought the Spyro Reignited trilogy! And it's a fantastic remaster. It looks and feels the way I remember these games, even though there's no possible way the original games looked as good as they do in my mind. It really captures the spirit of Spyro.

I remembered the level design of the Spyro games being fantastic, and it still holds up. Honestly, in the twenty years since these games came out, I'm not sure I've ever played anything that's surpassed them in terms of level design. I love spotting gems in distant places and going 'okay, how can I get over there?'

Actually, even the first Spyro the Dragon is great, when I remembered it more as something you just had to get through before you could play the superior sequels.

I am constantly running into walls in this game, and Rei mocks me heartily for it. She's also ended up yelling some odd things at me during my endeavours to defeat plane-piloting enemies. 'Fuck the plane! Fuck the plane better! RIONA! You're not fucking!'

(Every time I encounter a small animal in the game, she goes, 'Awww! Kill it. Kill it, kill it, kill it.')

One complaint I do have: I never realised as a child, but there are no female dragons and it's really unsettling. I've encountered thirty-something dragons, all male. I keep chasing down egg thieves; where did the eggs come from? Is it essential for me to retrieve the eggs because the female dragons were somehow wiped out before the game began?