Trabia Garden

The latest instalment in playing games so Tem can watch: we've started the Uncharted series! We're still on Drake's Fortune at the moment.

Because R2 is 'sprint' in The Last of Us but 'shoot' in Uncharted, I keep startling myself by accidentally firing my gun. I explained this to Tem.

Riona: So, if I ever fire my gun for no reason, I'm trying to run.
Tem: Ah, truly the American experience.

This playthrough contains a troubling amount of Tem laughing at me as I plummet to my death.

'You died so beautifully that time,' Tem commented at one point, as Nate fell lifeless into the ocean. 'Your arms were flung out, your leg was bent; it looked like a graceful ballet move. It was like the end of Swan Lake.'

Tem: You keep dying, but you get a tiny bit further each time.
Ginger: Just like Edge of Tomorrow.
Riona: Oh, wow, I would love to see Nate in an Edge of Tomorrow situation.

I've never previously considered putting Nate in a 'dying kicks you back' time loop, but he does seem like a fun character for it! I'd need more of a concept than that, though. I've been struggling a bit to come up with fic concepts lately; it's been a relatively slow writing year so far, although at least I've got my Final Fantasy VIII website to work on, so I don't feel like I haven't been doing anything creative.

'We've killed a lot of people,' Tem observed. 'We're such an upbeat, fun-loving guy in the cutscenes; we don't seem like the kind of person who'd shoot hundreds of people without hesitation. We don't even take a moment to reflect. Nate never goes, "Sorry, Elena; I need some time to sit with the weight of my sins."'

Riona: Why is there a guy pushing explosive barrels into the river? He was doing it even before he knew we were downstream. Is that just his job?
Tem: Well, someone's got to do it. Think of the fish.
Riona: Oh, yes, of course. We hate those fucking fish.
Tem: Those fish have had it easy for too long.

At one point, Nate launched himself in the wrong direction and fell to his death. I exclaimed, 'D—!' and then cut myself off. I was trying to scold Nate for jumping the wrong way: 'Nate!' But my instinct when scolding, it turns out, is to say the name of our evil cat: 'Dipper!'

Dipper's lovely. He's very friendly and gentle. But he is on a constant take-no-prisoners quest for food, and he will chew on anything he can get his paws on. I've had to stitch my bra straps together multiple times because Dipper keeps chewing through them. Nathan Drake, to my knowledge, has never done this.

More adventures in Final Fantasy XVI! I've just met Isabelle, crossed the checkpoint and reached the Veil.


( Notes on Final Fantasy XVI. )


Every Final Fantasy has its own strengths and weaknesses, and it's always interesting to play a new one and discover what those are. From my experience of Final Fantasy XVI so far, I'd say it's strong on worldbuilding - the world is interesting and feels fleshed out - but a little weak on its characters and their interactions, although its excellent portrayal of body language helps. In many ways, it's sort of the opposite of Final Fantasy XV, which had a weak world but absolutely shone in its character interactions.

Interestingly, Final Fantasy XVI is really good at minor NPCs! It feels a bit like they put the same level of thought into every character, regardless of their importance to the narrative, resulting in minor characters that feel unusually fleshed out and major characters that feel a little flat.

Our cat Zuko is slightly obsessed with this game. When he hears me start playing, he'll come running to sit in front of the television and watch Clive move. Sometimes he tries to attack Torgal. Like Torgal, Zuko is grey and white and very fluffy, so maybe he feels his position in the household is threatened.

In our ongoing tradition of playing strange plot-twisty games together, Tem and I have finished World's End Club!

World's End Club is extremely weird. It feels very much like a murder game aimed at small children. My First Murder Game.

Tem pointed out that all the characters look like they could be Pokémon gym leaders, and xe's right. It's disconcerting.


( Spoilers for World's End Club. )


World's End Club is not a very good game. It's awkward to play, the characters are largely one-note and the English voice acting is extremely variable. But I wasn't bored, so I'll consider it a success. I was extremely confused, but I wasn't bored.

Our cat Zuko wasn't bored either. He loved watching me play, and he went wild attacking the screen during one boss fight. It was delightful, even if I was concerned at points about whether our television would survive his interest.

Also, I've had the Go-Getters' Club theme stuck in my head for hours.

A long time ago, I posted here to say 'should I watch The Mentalist?' and half the comments said 'NO, WATCH PSYCH INSTEAD' and I went 'screw you, I'm watching The Mentalist.' One might wonder why I bothered asking the opinion of my flist if I was just going to ignore it.

I don't regret my decision to watch The Mentalist at all, but all the enthusiastic recommendations for Psych stuck in my mind, so I'm checking it out at last. Only took me a decade.

Riona: I'm not sure about Shawn. I think he's a bit too much of an arsehole for me.
Rei: He acts exactly like Patrick Jane. You love Patrick Jane.
Riona: Maybe I just don't like Shawn because he's not traumatised enough.

I've heard the character dynamics of Psych compared to Scrubs, and it was slightly weird to go in with the set of expectations that that creates. I wanted Shawn and Gus to love each other as much as JD and Turk do, and of course I was inevitably to be disappointed, because nobody has ever loved anyone as much as JD and Turk love each other.

'Turk, we're not married.'
'Dude, we're a little married.'
'I know. I love it.'

(There's a late Scrubs episode where JD says 'I love you more than Turk' to Elliot and I yelled 'NO YOU FUCKING DON'T' at the screen. While I do enjoy the implication that 'I love you more than Turk' is the most romantic thing JD could possibly say, that was absolutely, one hundred percent a lie. No question about it. I defy anyone to watch Scrubs and try to claim it was true.)

Given the JD-and-Turk comparisons I'd heard, it was a bit of a surprise that Gus plays the longsuffering straight man to Shawn's wackiness, whereas JD and Turk are both ridiculous and cheerfully enable each other in their ridiculousness (and JD would never delight in Turk's suffering the way Shawn does in Gus's). I am sort of shipping Shawn with poor longsuffering Gus, though.

Shawn and Lassiter's dynamic is also very different to JD and Dr Cox's. Lassiter genuinely seems to dislike Shawn; JD is important to Dr Cox, although Dr Cox would never admit it. Shawn enjoys pushing Lassiter's buttons; meanwhile, JD adores Dr Cox, craves his approval and pushes his buttons without intent, because Dr Cox is a man made entirely of buttons.

A cat features prominently in the fifth episode of Psych, and Zuko watched the episode in fascination for twenty solid minutes. Then the episode froze and he wandered off while I was restarting it, and I genuinely felt bad. He'd been enjoying the episode so much, and now he wasn't going to find out how it ended! Riona, Zuko is a kitten and he's not that invested in following procedural plots.

To be honest, I'm disappointed that the episode didn't end with Shawn deciding to keep the cat. I'm enjoying the show so far, but it was improved immeasurably by Shawn carrying a cat into all the crime scenes.

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!

Our cat Mabel has a habit of adopting soft toys and moving them around the flat. This means I recently turned around and found Rei's Banette lying on the floor of my bedroom.

Banette, if you're unfamiliar with this particular Pokémon, is canonically a cursed, murderous soft toy.

I was not very happy.


I worried at the start of Red Dead Redemption II that I wouldn't get along with this game. It's starting to click for me now, but it's not fun, if that makes sense. It's engaging and ambitious and immersive and beautiful, but it doesn't actually feel good to play. As a Wild West simulator, it does pretty well; as a game, it struggles.

Everything that isn't actual gameplay is great! It's very strange. I'm enjoying it, but I'm confused.

I love my horse dearly. At first, in the mission where you go to the stables and are forced to buy a horse, I went WAIT, WHAT, NO, I ALREADY HAVE A HORSE, DON'T FORCE ME TO - and then I inevitably fell in love with the horse I bought. Her name is Kay and she's a very good girl. Being able to stroke your horse at will is a great addition.

If I wanted to worry about keeping my videogame protagonists fed, though, I'd buy a Tamagotchi. And I wish there were a way to make Arthur hold on to the weapons you've equipped him with rather than shoving them enthusiastically into his saddlebag whenever he strays within two miles of his horse.

I'm also extremely bad at this game! At one point the police were looking for me and I tried to get away from the scene of my crime and rode Kay straight into a tree. I flew off my horse, my horse fell over, and the police came up and shot me while I was trying to recover.

I'm glad there are moments of humour. I think my favourite thing in the game so far is in the mission 'A Quiet Time', when you're gearing up for a bar fight and it immediately cuts to all of you dancing together. I also love that one of the missions is just shovelling manure.

I fuss over my horse a lot. I'll stroke her when I'm about to mount her or have just dismounted; I'll go to greet her in the morning when Arthur's just woken up. My housemates have started to express discomfort with the way Arthur coos over her and calls her a good girl. 'It sounds sexual.' I refuse to be deterred.

You can keep a handful of additional horses in the stables, so I still have my first horse, who's named Marcus after The 100's Kane. The other horse I have in the stable is Lady, an American Standardbred. I saw a guy trying to get a stone out of his horse's hoof on the side of the road, and the horse kicked him to death, and I went 'hey, free horse, I'm sure I absolutely will not regret this.' She kicked me a couple of times as well, but we're friends now.


On a different note entirely: today I tried to find out some information about newts and learnt they're a type of salamander and went 'wait, what' because somehow I have gone three decades believing that salamanders are fictional.

It's been a rough few days. We've just learnt that Mabel, the little tabby here pictured wrapped around her enormous brother Dipper's shoulders, has a heart condition that means she's unlikely to see her second birthday. If we're lucky, we might have a few more months with her. She's home from the hospital, at least, and she seems happy enough now that she's on medication.

She's a good cat, and she loves me more than anyone could possibly deserve to be loved. I'd like someone to know she was here for a while.




(I say 'she's a good cat', but this is her usual position: sitting in front of my computer when I'm trying to work, yelling in my face. She's a nightmare. I love her so much.)