I wrote this round-up in mid-September, but guess what you're getting now!

[spindizzy]

Hey guys! So apart from the mental health stuff (which, to be fair, is taking up some brain space at the moment!), I have been binging on media because I... Kinda took August off? Unplanned? I feel better for it, but also I'm recalibrating whether I'm behind and how much I can reasonably expect to get done in one go. But the plus side is that I've been cramming media into my face like it's going out of style sooooo quick round-up!

• A Hat in Time (Video game) — I've been having a lot of fun with this. You are a tiny little girl, riding around space in your magic space house that is powered by time, until the mafia try to shake you down for toll money and accidentally let all the time out! Oh no! Cue adventure platforming, hitting things with an umbrella, and collecting balls of yarn to make yourself new hats to give yourself new special abilities! It's kinda my jam. It feels a little bit like Spyro? In that you can roam the world and explore every nook and cranny if you want, or you can just skip straight to the end of the level and collect your McGuffin and bypass LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE.
  
  ... And then I unlocked the world where your main problem is that you're trying to stealth past everyone IN A PLATFORMER (auuuugh), and another one where a ghost steals your soul and gets you to sign a contract saying that you'll murder some suicidal fire spirits for them. What. WHAT.
  
  (Also, I am here to say that the boss battles are ABSOLUTE NONSENSE and I need someone who is actually good at games to come and do them for me, because THIS IS NONSENSE.)


• Cliff Empire (Video game) — I've kinda hit the doldrums with this one. It's a city builder! And it has a surprisingly low death toll because when your people get sick of your mismanagement, they just go back to space! (I don't deliberately kill people in city builders, I'm just very bad at them.) But also you don't have a lot of space or resources, because the premise is that you're building cities on giant towers above the toxic remains of the earth. And once you've got your city to the point where it's functioning, there's... Not a lot else to do? Apart from be mad at your space overlords who should know that you're running on ecopower and batteries (because you're trying to live ethically!) but ask you to send them more batteries than you've ever owned anyway. WHAT IS UP WITH YOU SPACE OVERLORDS AND WHY ARE YOU SO ARBITRARY ABOUT EVERYTHING.


• Guardian (cdrama – there used to be legal subs available on youtube, but ALAS they are no more!) — This is a series I got off lazulisong and oh no. Oh no. It is my tropes. lazulisong wrote a summary post here, and I'm livetweeting it here, but what you need to know:
  
  • It's based off an urban fantasy BL webnovel (which is being translated here). The tv show is a little different from it – there's two species of aliens, one of which lives underground and one of which fused with plants and animals, living secretly among humans, and the Special Investigation Department's job is to catch any of the underground people who come to the surface and commit crime!
  
  
  • The two lead characters are Zhao Yunlan, the totally charming and laid back leader of the SID (who is secretly a genius control freak who makes everything sound like he's flirting and I love him) and Shen Wei, the Totally Normal Human Professor Who Just Happens To Get Mixed Up In These Weird Cases. All these weird cases. Every single one. Totally by accident. And he just wants to take every opportunity to look after Zhao Yunlan, who is happy to just sit back and let that happen! I am dying.
  
  
  • There are other members of the team, like Zhu Hong, a snake lady, who is grouchy and pretty and competent and deserves better than her unrequited crush on Zhao Yunlan! And Lin Jing, the tech guy, who is a boring disaster nerd for the first thirty episodes and then actually does something interesting! And Chu Shuzhi, who is ALSO grumpy and competent but also likes throwing down more than Zhu Hong does. Especially with Guo Changcheng, who is NOT competent and is pretty much the obligatory useless ball of kindness, who obviously gets paired with Chu Shuzhi a lot. And I guess Da Qing is there too. (He's a cat sometimes! ... He's there too.)
  
  
  • I don't know if I can recommend it, in all honesty, but it is very much my tropes. It has pining! Secret identities that actually get resolved in a sensible manner! (I spent an entire episode screeching at my laptop over it, okay. Screeching.) A grumpy AF character going squishy and tender for the ball of sunshine! Ridiculous fight scenes! Someone with phenomenal cosmic power bending to the will of someone without them like it's the only possible thing they can do! Team shenanigans!
  
  
  • ... It's very my jam, okay. There's stuff I don't like – there are some episodes with mental health stuff where I'm just like "Oooh, no, no this is not good," and some other stuff where I was just like "uggggggggh maybe I should skip these episodes entirely" – but the bits that hit have me on the floor making dying raptor noises because I'm a disaster.
  
  
  • I am up to episode thirty-seven and it is very Not Het, and also every couple of episodes I just have to screech a little? It's so much my thing, waaaaaaaah.
  
  
  • Plus the villain, now that he's shown up, is just... A mess. He's a melodramatic mess and I'm invested.
  
  
  • The subs are Not Great though. The acting is good! The props are eh! The cgi sure is there! But the acting man, I'm here for it, grammatically wonky subs and all.


• Ultimate Beastmaster (Netflix series) — Ultimate Beastmaster is back! Bad New Barrett is on commentary for the UK! The new challenges are absolute nonsense! I am deeply entertaining by the lunatic Australian guy who's like... Casually going through all of these challenges like it's nothing? ("Oh man, I have the highest score in the competition but also failed out earlier than I wanted, GUESS I'M RUNNING THE ENTIRE CHALLENGE AGAIN.") And also the returning commentary teams are great! (I love the italian commentary team, they're so much fun!) We watched some with Jill while we were visiting her, and honestly it was GREAT. Especially because Jill and I both shriek at the same nonsense.


• sithe and I ended up watching all of Great British Bake-Off, all of the current series of Great British Menu, Monster Garage (which is a weird "come and make a random thing for a guy who makes no sense and get some free tools I guess!" show, which have included making: a portable automated milking machine, a thing to make crop circles, a portable dunk tank...), and a couple of seasons of Project Runway. (America, why do you edit your shows to make everyone look like awful human beings. Why can't you just have nice people instead.) OUR TV TASTE IS NOT GOOD, OKAY.


• And splend and I are playing Quantic Dream games together, because Sam likes Quantic Dream games and I'm emotionally invested in the fandom around "Robot detective learns how people work" and/or "Human detective is uncomfortable with every single thing around robot detective but guess we're being weird and awkward about it together now!"
  
  • So we've played all of Detroit: Become Human (MY STUPID ROBOT DOOFUS BOY also holy shit does David Cage actually understand ANY OF THE IMAGERY AND HISTORICAL HORROR HE'S USING HERE), which I am writing a whole THING about apparently because yelling about how this future makes no sense is good for battles on 4thewords. Plus, you know, I have Issues with it, but I am also apparently really emotionally invested?
  
  
  • Aaaaaand to cure my post-game emotional hangover, we started playing Heavy Rain! ... Apparently my tendency to try to rationalise narrative structure and motives until something coherent comes out is making these games make a lot more sense than they actually do. We are also just reflexively yelling "JASON!" at the TV a lot, because... What. WHAT. Also I think this game would have been a lot better if we'd not had the option for internal monologues? ... Also I accidentally killed one of the protagonists in a chapter where you're not supposed to be able to kill them. OOPS. I'M GREAT AT THIS. One good end, one neutral end, and one bad end about cancels out, right?!
  
  
  • sithe thought Heavy Rain was the game where you had multiple options for who the murderer was, depending on what evidence you found, but as far as google and gamefaqs can tell us (yeah, GAMEFAQS, like it's the early 2000s in here), it's not Heavy Rain. Does this ring any bells for anyone?
  
  
  • And after playing that, we got out Beyond Two Souls, which I'm honestly enjoying a LOT more than I enjoyed Heavy Rain. The dialogue still has the problem of "No one speaks like that, no one has EVER spoken like that," and some of the narrative choices (like what happens to Jodie at the birthday party) only make sense if you take the actions the game expects? But I'm interested in the murder ghost and Jodie's relationship with it, because creepy murder ghost protectors and non-linear storytelling are enough my jam that I don't mind that the dialogue is awful.


• (I have also been doing a lot of 4thewords, lately, which is fun! Except that it's also nonsense, because WHY IS THERE A QUEST TO FIGHT FORTY-FOUR OF ONE MONSTER, COME ON!)

Apart from that... I'm excited about my knitting! I have A LOT of knitting projects lined up for the future, and I know from experience that I can do colourwork while watching subtitled TV, so guess what I'll probably be doing for a while? I also spent most of August actively repelled by the idea of reading, spent the first two weeks of September face-first in a pit of Detroit: Become Human fic, and now I'm cramming ebooks into my maw like it's going out of style, so I guess I fixed myself? So I guess... Hi everyone! My life not entirely work and brain stuff! How is everyone else, and what are you enjoying now?