FFXI: Rise of the Zilart summary!
Aug. 13th, 2025 09:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
It all began with a stone, or so the legend says.
In ages past, a sentient jewel, enormous and beautiful, banished the darkness. Its many-colored light filled the world with life and brought forth mighty gods.
Bathed in that light, the world entered an age of bliss until, after a time, the gods fell into slumber. That world was called Vana'diel.
The legend goes on to say...
From the darkest depths of the earth the Warriors of the Crystal rose...
The Rise of the Zilart expansion tells the story of the Warriors of the Crystal, and of the ancient clash between two races, one of which was the Zilart - who have plans to bring about Vana'diel's destruction. Read on to find out just what the Zilart have planned.
(As before, the actual game script is located at my Neocities site, here: https://altheavalara.neocities.org/ffxi/rotz - what lies under the cut is my summary for those who don't want to read the long script.)
( spoilers galore! )
What I'm Doing Wednesday
Aug. 13th, 2025 05:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
( books (Hodgson, Greene & Arroyo, Rudhyar, Tyl, Gillig, Al-Rashid. Abulafia) )
yarning
I went to yarn group Sunday and learned one of our members is moving away next week. That is sad. I finished sewing together a bunny and started a new one, and my shoulder didn't protest too much, so that was a nice surprise. I finished the eyes and faces of 2 bunnies yesterday and need to take photos and list them. It felt good to be crocheting again.
healthcrap
I'm so worried about my parents and various other things that it's affecting my sleep. I always have trouble getting into Deep sleep, and lately the fitbit is registering single digit minutes in deep, and I've been having stupid insomnia. I need probably to start doing yoga nidra again, but I'm blocked about it for some reason. Like I'm blocked about Yoga and Pilates. Except that is at least partly due to it being so damned hot. There is little I can do about the things I'm stressing over, and yet. It's so frustrating. ( cut for discussion of weight loss )
house
I've done a fair bit of cleaning/chores today to counteract the worry. And hopefully the insomnia.
astrology
Mercury stationed direct in the wee hours of Monday, so communication and travel snafus are diminishing over the course of the week.
#resist
Monday, 9/01: Workers over Billionaires (#5051)
I hope you're all doing well! <333
yarning
I went to yarn group Sunday and learned one of our members is moving away next week. That is sad. I finished sewing together a bunny and started a new one, and my shoulder didn't protest too much, so that was a nice surprise. I finished the eyes and faces of 2 bunnies yesterday and need to take photos and list them. It felt good to be crocheting again.
healthcrap
I'm so worried about my parents and various other things that it's affecting my sleep. I always have trouble getting into Deep sleep, and lately the fitbit is registering single digit minutes in deep, and I've been having stupid insomnia. I need probably to start doing yoga nidra again, but I'm blocked about it for some reason. Like I'm blocked about Yoga and Pilates. Except that is at least partly due to it being so damned hot. There is little I can do about the things I'm stressing over, and yet. It's so frustrating. ( cut for discussion of weight loss )
house
I've done a fair bit of cleaning/chores today to counteract the worry. And hopefully the insomnia.
astrology
Mercury stationed direct in the wee hours of Monday, so communication and travel snafus are diminishing over the course of the week.
#resist
Monday, 9/01: Workers over Billionaires (#5051)
I hope you're all doing well! <333
I made myself sad again.
Aug. 12th, 2025 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
YouTube video: What event in your life still messes with you to this day? | Askreddit
I left this comment there:
My best friend ever, who I was in an on-again, off-again romance with because it took me ages to realize I'm basically asexual, died in 2019. I've never been the same since. I already had chronic depression long before that, and she was a massive bright light in my life. So bright that I moved halfway across the country to be with her after years of us being online-only friends. The move was the best thing I ever did in my life, it made my quality of life go up dramatically because I was able to be myself and be free in Portland, since I couldn't be that in Iowa. Having Lily there with me as well, super close friends the entire time whether we were dating or not, made it even better. She was unerringly, kind, compassionate, accepting, loving, intelligent, interesting, delightful, and her weird matched mine perfectly and balanced out many of my character flaws. (Such as my being a pessimist who is distrustful of strangers, and her being an optimist who trusted people easily.) Every discussion we had was fascinating and engaging, her laugh was like an antidepressant that worked instantly, we could spend hours entertaining each other with bad puns and worse jokes.
When she died, unexpectedly in her sleep from a seizure (she had epilepsy), an important part of my spirit died with her. Despite having not been much of a crier since before puberty, I couldn't go more than an hour without something reminding me of her and setting me off crying. I had to stop listening to my favorite musical artist because Lily had introduced me to them, and so music that used to comfort me when I was overstimulated would make me start crying uncontrollably even in public, and I hate crying in front of other people because I used to get bullied mercilessly for being a crybaby. I used to be a very spiritual person, not religious, but I would sing as a spiritual experience and even dance around for the same reason. I haven't done much of either since Lily died. Even writing this, now, I have to fight back tears. Without her brilliant positive nature, my negative nature just keeps pulling me in deeper, making me a more miserable person, and the rise of fascism in my country is just making it even worse. I feel like I could maybe be coping and more hopeful in these trying times if she had never died.
I still have dreams about her, where she has either come back from the dead or never died to begin with. I still fight tears when I wake up from these dreams, because it's almost like losing her all over again.
A few weeks ago, just when I thought it couldn't get worse, I found out the answer to a mystery that had plagued me ever since she died: how can a seizure kill someone? Well the answer is simple: flailing around in bed from the seizure, the victim can suffocate in their bedding. Given Lily was prone to sleeping on her stomach under a massive pile of blankets and comforters, I'd say it's 99% likely she suffocated in her sleep because of the seizure. And that just messed me up even more than before.
I've been coping a bit with my writing. I have a whole arc for this one character who, like me, loses her best friend ever very suddenly (her friend was murdered) and even almost a decade later, she's still a wreck about it in various ways. So I explore my grief through that character. But it's a bandage on a gaping wound. A wound that's scabbed over, but any picking at the scab makes it open up again. I do it sometimes anyway.
I've also named characters after her, and gave one new character epilepsy in her honor. One of the more prominent side characters in some of the books has a variant of her personality. Wait, correction: two of them do.
The worst part? I didn't even get to go to her funeral. Her mom didn't invite me or tell me where it was, and I still don't know why. I'm basically taking everyone who was there at their word that she died, which is probably why I keep having dreams that she's still alive... like my brain still can't quite believe it because seeing is believing. Though at the same time, I don't know if I would feel better or worse if I could have seen her body. Probably a lot worse, though.
I get through it by walking through the world with proverbial blinders on, dissociating when it's too much to bear. I do laugh, quite often; it's another coping mechanism, one I learned from years of depression. Laughter is a lit match against the darkness, bright but fading fast.
~ End quote ~
The character who's dealing with the grief of her best friend being murdered: One of Vedya's multiverse doubles, Sarah's double being the murder victim. This double first appears briefly in book 4, and becomes a major character in book 5. She goes by the nickname of Naga.
The two characters who have variants of Lily's personality: Acorn Bonewits (a wood nymph) and Caligo (a kind of faery in the story called an Aeventyrichor). I think it's fitting that they're both faeries. I guess there's also a bit of Lily in Cally (Calandra Metaxas, a human).
The character I gave epilepsy to: Mia "Lenore" Green, one of Ashkii's friends, also human. She also has some of Lily's personality in her. Ashkii's first encounter with her is her having a seizure in art class. I only just now realized that her preferred name, Lenore, is canonically named after a famous dead woman from Poe's writings. Like, even in-universe that's true, since she's a major Poe fan.
I left this comment there:
My best friend ever, who I was in an on-again, off-again romance with because it took me ages to realize I'm basically asexual, died in 2019. I've never been the same since. I already had chronic depression long before that, and she was a massive bright light in my life. So bright that I moved halfway across the country to be with her after years of us being online-only friends. The move was the best thing I ever did in my life, it made my quality of life go up dramatically because I was able to be myself and be free in Portland, since I couldn't be that in Iowa. Having Lily there with me as well, super close friends the entire time whether we were dating or not, made it even better. She was unerringly, kind, compassionate, accepting, loving, intelligent, interesting, delightful, and her weird matched mine perfectly and balanced out many of my character flaws. (Such as my being a pessimist who is distrustful of strangers, and her being an optimist who trusted people easily.) Every discussion we had was fascinating and engaging, her laugh was like an antidepressant that worked instantly, we could spend hours entertaining each other with bad puns and worse jokes.
When she died, unexpectedly in her sleep from a seizure (she had epilepsy), an important part of my spirit died with her. Despite having not been much of a crier since before puberty, I couldn't go more than an hour without something reminding me of her and setting me off crying. I had to stop listening to my favorite musical artist because Lily had introduced me to them, and so music that used to comfort me when I was overstimulated would make me start crying uncontrollably even in public, and I hate crying in front of other people because I used to get bullied mercilessly for being a crybaby. I used to be a very spiritual person, not religious, but I would sing as a spiritual experience and even dance around for the same reason. I haven't done much of either since Lily died. Even writing this, now, I have to fight back tears. Without her brilliant positive nature, my negative nature just keeps pulling me in deeper, making me a more miserable person, and the rise of fascism in my country is just making it even worse. I feel like I could maybe be coping and more hopeful in these trying times if she had never died.
I still have dreams about her, where she has either come back from the dead or never died to begin with. I still fight tears when I wake up from these dreams, because it's almost like losing her all over again.
A few weeks ago, just when I thought it couldn't get worse, I found out the answer to a mystery that had plagued me ever since she died: how can a seizure kill someone? Well the answer is simple: flailing around in bed from the seizure, the victim can suffocate in their bedding. Given Lily was prone to sleeping on her stomach under a massive pile of blankets and comforters, I'd say it's 99% likely she suffocated in her sleep because of the seizure. And that just messed me up even more than before.
I've been coping a bit with my writing. I have a whole arc for this one character who, like me, loses her best friend ever very suddenly (her friend was murdered) and even almost a decade later, she's still a wreck about it in various ways. So I explore my grief through that character. But it's a bandage on a gaping wound. A wound that's scabbed over, but any picking at the scab makes it open up again. I do it sometimes anyway.
I've also named characters after her, and gave one new character epilepsy in her honor. One of the more prominent side characters in some of the books has a variant of her personality. Wait, correction: two of them do.
The worst part? I didn't even get to go to her funeral. Her mom didn't invite me or tell me where it was, and I still don't know why. I'm basically taking everyone who was there at their word that she died, which is probably why I keep having dreams that she's still alive... like my brain still can't quite believe it because seeing is believing. Though at the same time, I don't know if I would feel better or worse if I could have seen her body. Probably a lot worse, though.
I get through it by walking through the world with proverbial blinders on, dissociating when it's too much to bear. I do laugh, quite often; it's another coping mechanism, one I learned from years of depression. Laughter is a lit match against the darkness, bright but fading fast.
~ End quote ~
The character who's dealing with the grief of her best friend being murdered: One of Vedya's multiverse doubles, Sarah's double being the murder victim. This double first appears briefly in book 4, and becomes a major character in book 5. She goes by the nickname of Naga.
The two characters who have variants of Lily's personality: Acorn Bonewits (a wood nymph) and Caligo (a kind of faery in the story called an Aeventyrichor). I think it's fitting that they're both faeries. I guess there's also a bit of Lily in Cally (Calandra Metaxas, a human).
The character I gave epilepsy to: Mia "Lenore" Green, one of Ashkii's friends, also human. She also has some of Lily's personality in her. Ashkii's first encounter with her is her having a seizure in art class. I only just now realized that her preferred name, Lenore, is canonically named after a famous dead woman from Poe's writings. Like, even in-universe that's true, since she's a major Poe fan.
Was I optimistic?
Aug. 12th, 2025 06:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)

As yet unpublished, years ago I wrote a book ("Ressa Akamai and the Bridge Not Crossed," #4 in my Ravenstone Family series) taking place in an alternate universe where the date was 2029 AD. Donald Trump was President For Life Donald Trump, FEMA had been turned into work camps for the homeless and disabled, & ICE camps were full-fledged death camps for various other undesirables.
It's also a fantasy novel with magic and witches, so other things going on were that magic had been exposed, faeries were routinely attacking major cities and rendering them to ruins, Trump was having law enforcement arrest witches and trying to turn them into Janissaries for the US military, and the universe was ending.
Apart from that last part about the universe ending, which had nothing to do with Trump, I now fear I may have been optimistic.
Trump isn't even trying to pretend not to be fascist now
Aug. 12th, 2025 05:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Donald Trump is trying to use the National Guard to take over Washington DC, and now he intends to go after Democrat controlled cities and states. So he's full on Hitler at this point, he's not even trying to pretend otherwise now. Here is the link: https://shorturl.at/ssaPb (It goes to Yahoo News)
If you are in the National Guard and you follow this extremely illegal order from the fascist orangutan infesting the white house, you would be a traitor to your country, and the punishment for treason in the US is execution. Be a true patriot, refuse any and all illegal orders from Fuhrer Trump. Then please arrest Trump and arrest everyone in the Supreme Court and his cabinet and every other government facility who has been helping him, so that we can convict them all of treason.
If you are in the National Guard and you follow this extremely illegal order from the fascist orangutan infesting the white house, you would be a traitor to your country, and the punishment for treason in the US is execution. Be a true patriot, refuse any and all illegal orders from Fuhrer Trump. Then please arrest Trump and arrest everyone in the Supreme Court and his cabinet and every other government facility who has been helping him, so that we can convict them all of treason.
YouTube wants your data to sell to other companies.
Aug. 12th, 2025 03:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
You should sign this petition to protest YouTube's new AI-powered age verification system. And here's why:
AI has proven again and again that it doesn't work right, and the ways it can mess up can be horrible. AI based age verification, which has no transparency at all, is going to hurt a lot of people. Customers and content creators alike are going to be kicked off for unknown reasons, reasons which may include "user is not white," "user looks younger than they actually are," "user has facial scars or burns," "user is disabled in a way that affects their face," "the AI just glitched," and many other reasons. We should boycott YouTube until they stop this nonsense.
Furthermore, companies are already finding that it's easier and cheaper to hire humans to do things rather than AIs, because AI keeps failing in weird and expensive ways. Recently, an AI being used as a programming tool deleted petabytes of the programmer's data for no apparent reason, data which was unrecoverable. What if YouTube's AI glitches and deletes entire channels for no reason?
Then there's the privacy issue. Companies like YouTube have far too much data about us as it is already, and now they want even more, including your face, credit card information, and maybe videos of you naked in your home. They aren't satisfied with the billions of dollars they're making in ad revenue, so they're trying to make you a product they can sell.
"But I have nothing to hide!" Of course you do. Data leaks are a weekly phenomenon nowadays. Do you really want to risk your nudes, your credit card information, your home address, or other important data being leaked online by giving that information to a service that is supposedly ad-supported and thus supposedly free to use? It's bad enough when that stuff happens to sites where you paid money for something; we can't let it happen for free sites like YouTube.
And lastly, YouTube already has a special version of their site aimed specifically at kids, where comments are disabled. They claim they're doing this data mining to protect the kids, but they're lying to you. This age verification won't work properly, it won't protect kids, it won't even keep kids out of places they shouldn't be. And why are we giving that job to corporations like Google anyway? That's meant to be the parents' job.
AI has proven again and again that it doesn't work right, and the ways it can mess up can be horrible. AI based age verification, which has no transparency at all, is going to hurt a lot of people. Customers and content creators alike are going to be kicked off for unknown reasons, reasons which may include "user is not white," "user looks younger than they actually are," "user has facial scars or burns," "user is disabled in a way that affects their face," "the AI just glitched," and many other reasons. We should boycott YouTube until they stop this nonsense.
Furthermore, companies are already finding that it's easier and cheaper to hire humans to do things rather than AIs, because AI keeps failing in weird and expensive ways. Recently, an AI being used as a programming tool deleted petabytes of the programmer's data for no apparent reason, data which was unrecoverable. What if YouTube's AI glitches and deletes entire channels for no reason?
Then there's the privacy issue. Companies like YouTube have far too much data about us as it is already, and now they want even more, including your face, credit card information, and maybe videos of you naked in your home. They aren't satisfied with the billions of dollars they're making in ad revenue, so they're trying to make you a product they can sell.
"But I have nothing to hide!" Of course you do. Data leaks are a weekly phenomenon nowadays. Do you really want to risk your nudes, your credit card information, your home address, or other important data being leaked online by giving that information to a service that is supposedly ad-supported and thus supposedly free to use? It's bad enough when that stuff happens to sites where you paid money for something; we can't let it happen for free sites like YouTube.
And lastly, YouTube already has a special version of their site aimed specifically at kids, where comments are disabled. They claim they're doing this data mining to protect the kids, but they're lying to you. This age verification won't work properly, it won't protect kids, it won't even keep kids out of places they shouldn't be. And why are we giving that job to corporations like Google anyway? That's meant to be the parents' job.
Appointment Week
Aug. 12th, 2025 02:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I have:
* 3 appointments tomorrow, all remote (for later today versions of "tomorrow", because I rarely get to sleep before midnight)
* 2 appointments Wednesday
* Only one appointment Thursday, but it looks like a doozy
* The morning primary care adjacent appointment on Wednesday got scheduled today (Monday) by using the magic combination of phrases "my oncologist said" and "new lump"
* (it's probably a ganglion cyst, since I have a history of those going back to the 1980s)
And then I managed to drive myself to Pained Noises & a complete lack of energy today by:
* ( Read more... )
* 3 appointments tomorrow, all remote (for later today versions of "tomorrow", because I rarely get to sleep before midnight)
* 2 appointments Wednesday
* Only one appointment Thursday, but it looks like a doozy
* The morning primary care adjacent appointment on Wednesday got scheduled today (Monday) by using the magic combination of phrases "my oncologist said" and "new lump"
* (it's probably a ganglion cyst, since I have a history of those going back to the 1980s)
And then I managed to drive myself to Pained Noises & a complete lack of energy today by:
* ( Read more... )
....!!!
Aug. 10th, 2025 07:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
https://comicbook.com/anime/news/homestuck-animated-series-hazbin-hotel-creators/
From the little I've absorbed about Hazbin Hotel, the creators might just be the correct kind of disturbed to do justice to Homestuck.
From the little I've absorbed about Hazbin Hotel, the creators might just be the correct kind of disturbed to do justice to Homestuck.
"Dying Georg"
Aug. 10th, 2025 01:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
I keep hearing people -- even people who are supposedly history educators -- saying that people only lived about 40 years back in the day. That is NOT true! That is a MYTH caused by a failure to understand how averages work! Yes, the average life expectancy was about 40 back then, but that was because so many children died back then, it drove the average down. Very few children made it out of childhood alive, which is a large part of why people used to have so many kids. If you didn't count the kids when doing the averaging, people generally lived just as long as they do now once they made it to adulthood, assuming they didn't die in a war.
Or put into meme speak: "Old timey kids were the 'spiders georg' of dying back in the day, and 'should not have been counted.'"
Or put into meme speak: "Old timey kids were the 'spiders georg' of dying back in the day, and 'should not have been counted.'"
Disbelief, suspension thereof / therein
Aug. 8th, 2025 03:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Suspension of disbelief = I will not start verbally poking holes in the physics of this action movie until we are out of the movie theater
Suspension in disbelief = a frozen state of constant WTF
Suspension in disbelief = a frozen state of constant WTF