Trabia Garden

Made an actual Silent Hill 2 edit of the Softer World strip I named my recent James/Mary fic after, because A Softer World and Silent Hill 2 are both totally timely and I know what year it is. I can't believe this strange, dark pairing still has so much power over my heart, all these years later.


The Final Fantasy VII Remake demo is now available on PS4! Just as a heads-up, it's about an hour long and you cannot save. Thoughts:

- Cloud is so pretty. Everyone is so pretty.

- You can't jump, alas! I keep accidentally opening the menu because I want to leap around pointlessly like you can in Final Fantasy XV.

- Cloud and Jessie have more chemistry than I'd expected. Huh. I loved them exchanging glances and shrugs while Barret lectured them in the elevator.

- I'll be very entertained if this remake not only reignites the ferocious Cloud/Tifa versus Cloud/Aerith shipwars but adds a Cloud/Jessie faction.

- I enjoyed Barret going 'okay, now prove you're one of us' and Cloud going 'uh, I'm... not?'

- Guard Scorpion struck me as an unreasonably tough, lengthy first boss fight. Nearly wiped out my supply of twenty-something potions. Maybe I just need to get a better grasp of the battle system? I think it's possible to switch difficulty levels mid-playthrough, so at least I'll be able to shift down if I continue to struggle in the full game.

- I really wanted them to have an 'attack while its tail is up' joke during that fight, but alas no.

- I don't remember any other voiced Final Fantasy in which the characters swear, and I am not yet used to it. At one point Cloud said 'no shit' and my reaction was very much 'gasp, he said a naughty word'.

- If you run into the security lasers five times, Jessie will stop expressing concern and start laughing at you. If you run into the lasers ten times, Jessie will ask, 'Um, do you have a fetish or something?'

- So far, it's looking promising!

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.)