Trabia Garden

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?

I usually post my fic both here and to AO3, but this one is cowritten with th_esaurus, so it seems like it makes more sense just to link the AO3 version!

A note on Gwen's age: after seeing Into the Spider-Verse, th_esaurus and I were cheerfully discussing bad-idea Gwen/Peter B Parker makeouts, and then we learnt what 'middle school' means and went 'oh, holy crap, we weren't thinking that bad an idea.' Gwen's nineteen in her comics and the film aged her down, so consider her aged back up here!


Title: Halloween on Christmas
Fandom: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
Rating: R
Pairing: Peter B Parker/(aged-up) Gwen Stacy
Wordcount: 2,700
Summary: "We were friends. I didn't love you on the condition that you had to be a total success at everything you did. I just loved you."

There’s a strange silence.

"Him," she says. "You? I don't know how to talk about it."

Warnings: Ill-advised making out across a twenty-year age gap.

AO3 link: Halloween on Christmas

Q: Riona, do you really have time to write mini-reviews of every game you've ever played?
A: I absolutely don't.
Q: And yet.
A: And yet!

Some of these are more just reminiscences than reviews, but I've said at least a line or two about every game. Possibly. I've almost certainly forgotten about some.

For the most part these are listed alphabetically, so you can easily track down any games you're interested in, but games in a series are listed together, so, for example, 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors, Virtue's Last Reward and Zero Time Dilemma are all under Z for Zero Escape, and World of Final Fantasy comes under F. I've put a (LP) next to games I've only experienced through Let's Plays. Flash games, text adventures and electronic versions of card, tile or board games are not included.

Games I first played after originally posting this entry are marked with an asterisk.


( Thoughts on every game I've ever played, or close enough. )


I'm glad I've put this very important and necessary entry into the waiting world.

WHO WANTS MAN-SPIDER COMICS?

I don't care; you're getting them anyway. In this edition you'll find out what Man-Spider gets up to when he feels like a swim (hint: it involves swimming), but first we're going to pay a visit to his Victorian ancestor. Man-Spider's manlike powers aren't hereditary, of course; he was bitten by a radioactive man. It is perhaps curious that his ancestor has similar powers. I suppose that family just has really bad luck around radioactive humans.


( The Victorian and Swimming Adventures of Man-Spider. )


I'm sort of astonished by my own inability to draw this character in a consistent way. He's just an oval with dot-eyes and stick-legs! It's hard to envision anything less difficult to draw! I'll never be an artist.

Something that particularly struck me in my rewatching of X-Men: First Class was one of the conversations between Charles and Raven. Charles says, 'Don't make me read your mind'; Raven says, 'You promised me you would never do that.'

And Charles says, 'Until recently, I never had to read your mind to know what you were thinking.'

This fascinates me. Because he's lived his whole life with the ability to hear what other people are thinking, Charles feels he's entitled to know everyone else's thoughts. In his head, 'I didn't know what you were thinking' is a perfectly legitimate justification for reading someone's mind. His promise that he would never read Raven's mind was a token gesture, because he didn't feel he needed to; I don't think he would have made that promise if he didn't feel confident in his ability to determine her thoughts anyway.

I suppose his attitude is sort of analogous to my reaction when I'm trying to converse with someone through a closed door; at some point, I'm going to ask whether I can come in, because I hate being deprived of visual feedback in a verbal conversation. Charles is used to mental feedback and feels off-balance without it.

I'm not sure what my point is here. I suppose it's that Charles doesn't understand the concept of mental privacy. Not only does he not respect the mental privacy of others; he doesn't realise that there's anything there to respect. In essentially saying 'you can't expect me to keep my promise if I don't know what you're thinking', he makes it clear that he doesn't really comprehend the importance of that promise; he doesn't understand why Raven might not want him inside her head. It's as inexplicable to him as it would be to me if a friend of mine said, 'Hey, could you possibly close your eyes whenever we talk from now on? It's just that the idea of you looking at me makes me really uncomfortable.'

Charles Xavier, you are such an intriguing man. His power seems like one that would engender empathy, but he lacks it in crucial areas like these, and I find that so interesting.

I love thinking about how the mutants relate to their powers, and how they'd react if they were suddenly taken away. If you took away Erik's mutation, for example, it would destroy him. Even though he must have terrible associations with it from his childhood, he loves his mutation; he thinks it's what sets him apart and makes him superior to humans, yes, but he also loves it on a more personal level. He's so very happy and animated in the 'go on, go on, I can deflect it' scene. Charles rather takes his powers for granted; if you asked him, he'd probably say he didn't rely on them that much, but take his telepathy away and make him interact with a stranger (or indeed with anyone other than Raven) and I imagine he'd have quite a lot of trouble. Alex, on the other hand, doesn't seem entirely comfortable with the power he has at his disposal, and he might be more relieved than distressed to wake up without it one day.

I CAN'T STOP TALKING. And of course I'm speculating on characters that already have decades of characterisation behind them. All my pondering is based on a single film! I have no authority whatsoever! Still, X-Men canon seems to be fairly convoluted and self-contradictory (just ask Erik/c Le(h)nsherr), so...

Do you guys remember Man-Spider: the spider with the powers of a man? I've drawn a few more of his rather mundane adventures since then, if you'd like to see them. (He also now has a nemesis!)

Still on the lined paper of my diary, I'm afraid. It's become a tradition now: I doodle an adventure on a napkin when I'm out with my friends, and then I have to copy it down into my diary before reipan inevitably steals the napkin. (She was a little too quick with her theft last time, which is why you're not seeing The Victorian Adventures of Man-Spider here.)


( The Further Adventures of Man-Spider. )


I am fully expecting a call from Marvel within the next few days.

On Wednesday evening, not having much to do, I turned on the television to find some sort of BBC school drama. Two schoolboys were speaking urgently, facing each other in an otherwise empty room; one, Josh, was explaining that he didn't fancy his girlfriend, and the other, Finn, was saying 'who cares; it's still a lay, isn't it?'

Well, I thought, this feels oddly homoerotic, and then I thought honestly, Riona, are your slash goggles on so tightly that you're seeing pairings seconds into an unknown television programme?, and then Josh leant in and kissed Finn.

My timing is immaculate.

I watched Josh's 'oh no I might be gay and now my friend hates me :(' agonising for the rest of the episode, and the moment I next had Internet access I used it to find out what exactly I had watched an episode of. Apparently it was a BBC One drama called Waterloo Road! (The fourth episode of the sixth series, in fact; I was a little surprised to discover that there were six series, because I had never heard of this programme before.) I don't know whether I'll be watching any more of it (there is, I'll admit, a possibility that I'll watch until the Josh-Finn storyline is resolved and a slightly larger possibility that I've been fast-forwarding through previous episodes to find bits where Josh stares longingly at Finn, but the rest of it didn't really catch my interest), but it's good to know what it is.

Not least because it means I can find the scene onto which I so serendipitously stumbled. Here it is! It's only about a minute long.


Anyway, I'm not sure of how much interest the Waterloo Road part of this entry will be to you, so I'm also included the ineptly illustrated adventures of Man-Spider: the spider with the powers of a man. Sorry about the lined paper; I scribbled it down in my diary.


( MAN-SPIDER, MAN-SPIDER, DOES WHATEVER A MAN... PIE... ER... )


Yeah, I don't know.

(I actually attempted to render the entire Final Fantasy VIII storyline in comic form some years ago, despite being completely incapable of drawing (this is not false modesty; I'm genuinely terrible. The only facial features the characters have are eyes and eyebrows, and half the time I draw them with their eyes closed). I only got up to the SeeD exam in Dollet before abandoning the project, having realised that I couldn't even pretend to be able to draw Biggs and Wedge (which is a shame, because I was rather looking forward to having them recite the Team Rocket motto), but perhaps I should scan in what I did manage at some point? Might be mildly amusing.)

I have returned from the Mancunian Adventure! Which... oh, wait, I didn't mention that I was going on the Mancunian Adventure here, did I? Well, for the past five days I have been in Manchester, hanging out with wanttobeatree and sazzlette. I fell over all the freaking time. They mocked me. It was entirely amazing.

I hope you enjoyed your transition into the new year! (I fell off the arm of Sazz's sofa twenty minutes into 2009. It was not a proud moment for me.)

There are several things I need to make entries about (the Twilight film, One Tree Hill, shut up shut up shut up), but first, some more general notes from the adventure:

- On Tuesday, we played a game of Scrabble. wanttobeatree won for ever by putting down the word 'Castieling'. It was beautiful.

- We saw in the new year with a sort of charades-ish game: everyone wrote down the names of celebrities and characters and stuffed them into a hat, then each player had to draw out slips of paper and verbally describe as many characters to their team as they could in a minute. Unfortunately, I am hopeless with celebrities. Matt Damon: 'He's a racing driver! ...he's not a racing driver.' Then sazzlette put 'Damon Hill' in the next batch of names, just to cause me pain. (I also thought that Julia Roberts was a chef. Stop judging me.)

- In the second round, using the same names, the player had to describe the subject of the slip of paper using three words or fewer. Julia Roberts, of course, could now be described with 'not a chef'. wanttobeatree confused us all enormously by describing Batman simply with 'BLACK EARS'. I drew 'Daleks' and realised halfway through saying 'teapot Who villains' that I meant 'pepperpot'. sazzlette and pinkegogirl leapt upon this:

'WILL-YOU-HAVE-A-JAF-FA-CAKE?'
'WHAT-IS-A-JAF-FA-CAKE?'
'IS-IT-A-CAKE-IS-IT-A-BIS-CUIT?'
'DOES-NOT-COM-PUTE.'
'EX-TER-MI-NATE-ALL-JAF-FA-CAKES.'

- The third round involved portraying the character without words, if you're thinking of playing it yourself. Of course, this doesn't lend itself well to textual description. I will mention, however, that in order to portray Bella from Twilight I fell over, and, having learnt how ridiculously clumsy I am, nobody seemed sure whether it was part of the clue or not.

- There is graffiti in Manchester that says 'I AM LORD VOLDEMORT'. Graffiti! And I thought he couldn't become any more evil!


Thank you so much to thebaconfat, squeemu and averysmallthing for your lovely cards!

DC comics from forty years ago are absolutely hilarious. We've got colossal boxes of my dad's old superhero comics in the attic, and I've just started looking through them. It is an interesting experience! Also, my dad becomes a gigantic fanboy when I talk to him about them, which is a bit brilliant.

One of my favourite stories is the hypothetical reversed-role tale 'Killer Kent Vs. Super Luthor!', because it is ridiculous on so many levels.


Mrs Kent: This is the third bank job we've had to pull this month!
Mr Kent: That's because we need lots of loot to pay Dr. Markem for the operation he performed today on our son, Clark! (Ahahaha, 'our son, Clark'? 'Our son, Clark. You remember that our son's name is Clark, don't you, dear?')
[In our imaginary tale, the Kents are Clark's real parents--and also notorious bank robbers!]
Mr Kent: But the operation was worth every G-note we had to pay! Now, thanks to Dr. Markem... we can be absolutely sure that Clark will grow up to be a criminal, like us!


That's right: they robbed a bank to pay for an operation to make their son evil. I know that some parents are keen on carrying on the family business, but, er...

OH, WAIT, IT GETS BETTER. Do you want to hear exactly what this operation entailed?


Dr. Markem: I gave you your criminal mind! Years ago, when you were a child, I inserted a tiny chromo-stimulant in your brain! I made it from evil genes and chromosomes I took from your real parents. It duplicated their criminal tendencies in you!


EVIL GENES, YOU GUYS. EVIL GENES. Also, I notice I seem to have somehow picked up these comics' bizarre tendency to emphasise everything despite never having read them before. Hmmm. (There is also a villain called Mxyzptlk, who is from the fifth dimension and can only be defeated by tricking him into saying his name backwards. OH, AND SUPERMAN HAS THE POWER OF SUPER-VENTRILOQUISM. ALTHOUGH DON'T ASK ME HOW THAT DIFFERS FROM NORMAL VENTRILOQUISM. AND SO DOES HIS SUPER-DOG. I have no idea why I didn't start reading these earlier.)

Did you know that Lex Luthor wants to kill Superman because Superman made him bald? I didn't. I laughed for about five minutes when my dad told me. SUPERHERO COMICS ARE AMAZING.

Well, I'll say this about The Dark Knight: it knows how to make me take notice within the first minute. WHY HELLO THERE, AGENT MAHONE. Clearly this is a Mahone driven mad by the Scofield investigation. "CRIMINALS USED TO BELIEVE IN THINGS."

(For some reason, I keep expecting Mahone's actor to have a soft upper-middle-class English accent, something Rupert Giles-ish, and it always surprises me when he speaks and I remember that oh, yes, he's American.)

The Joker is terrifying and fascinating and brilliant. Shortly after returning from the film, I found myself looking through all the packs of cards I could find in the house and collecting together all the Jokers. I don't know why. I, er, hope I'm not going to do anything sinister with them.

At the moment, I am in the slightly unfortunate position of having huge amounts of pent-up fannishness within me but being unable to express this fannishness on the Internet because, as I am still watching episodes that came out two years ago, setting one foot in the wrong place will result in my being bombarded with spoilers. Suffice it to say that I am very much in love with Prison Break at the moment. Oh, themes of familial love and devotion, you know I can never resist you.

(Here's the thing about Prison Break, though: you can't watch it with complacency. You can't think 'oh, it's all right, they can't kill him off, he's a main character', because they can and they freaking will. When a character in Prison Break is in a dangerous situation, you're not thinking 'hmmm, I wonder how he'll get out of this one'; you're panicking, because you genuinely have no idea which way it's going to go. It is destroying my nerves.)

I have watched up to 'Unearthed', the ninth episode of the second season. Please don't spoil me!

(EDIT: Also, er, Batman? That voice? Yeah. I really can't take you seriously.)