Once again, I did battleshipex and had fun. (Mostly.) Team Volcano was nice (our tagline: Surprisingly Chill!) and we came joint third with Mermaids. Between requests, my preferences (I've ... gone off M/M somehow?), and some board mechanics, I ended up writing a lot of original works. I also did art this year!

Last year's post for comparison.

( 14 works )

This year I contributed much fewer words (avg 3.6k/board; last year 5.8k/board), but I got much better at tag efficiency, so the drop in average tags claimed was only to 34/board from 46/board. Also I put in 26.4k points worth on the bosses, more than five times what I did last year!

Also apparently the median number of works created is 5 and the highest is 37. I'm at 11 this year. The median wordcount was 9852, which, well, honestly I'm surprised it was only that much larger than my wordcount?

With my 00s music, I got my bingo on vid_bingo! Link to card. Is it possible I'll try to do a second line bingo? Yes. Likely? Ehhhhh.

(Next round I think I'll request a 3×3 card and aim for blackout. I am not doing a blackout on a 5×5 card.)

(I used my Palps vid for Villain, 10s music is practically a free space – 268 10s songs vs 124 00s songs – and I have half an Everything Everywhere All At Once idea for Family, leaving Mentor.)

*returns to battleship*

I have been going through my All-Purpose Notes Document, and on line 350 (after deleting like 50 lines of accidental duplicates and irrelevant shit) I found my SWTOR storyline tier list! Behold.

( I'm correct and I do make the rules actually )

I figured I might as well start writing down at least the interesting expression parts of my language exchange on my DW!

First, congratulations seguing into celebration wrt 祝 zhù:

祝贺你 Congratulations!
祝福新人 Congrats to the newlyweds!
祝你生快 Happy birthday!
庆祝 qìngzhù to celebrate
example:
你毕业了，你应该好好庆祝一下。 You graduated, you should celebrate well.

提前很久买，便宜很多 Buy far in advance and prices will be cheap. (提前 tíqián in advance)

焦虑 jiāolǜ anxious
焦虑症 jiāolǜzhèng anxiety
and thence the extremely funny expression for being anxious:
急得像油锅上的蚂蚁 Anxious like an ant on a hot oil pan (probably with 像; the handwriting is a bit messy here) (googling, I also found 急得像热锅上的蚂蚁一般 which removes the oil and emphasizes the heat, and adds 一般 yībān "alike")

拿得起，放得下 being able to pick something up and then put it down; being able to let go and move forward (lit. pick up, put down)

羡慕 xiànmù envy (positive) – "Oh wow, I'm so jealous of you!"
嫉妒 jìdù envy (negative) – "If X has it, why don't I?" (Note the presence of the 疒 radical, which denotes sickness.)

It's been Way Too Hot for, like, a week+ already (hottest May in measured history and possibly also the driest...) and there seems to be no reprieve in sight. RIP me. This summer is going to be terrible. I guess I'll have to survive off ice cubes and ice cream.

In better news, nnozomi, your card arrived! Thank you, it really brightened my day. ♥

I decided to tackle the prompt for a not-in-English fanmix for fanmixfest, and as a result, have been essentially doing homework about the state of Finnish pop(/iskelmä) music since I stopped paying attention to it in, uh, 2014 or so. Here's four songs that are not going on the playlist.

Maija Vilkkumaa is still making music that is incisive and biting! This one is called "If I were a man" and it's about sexist double standards, essentially. I sort of want to vid this with a female character who crossdresses for plot reasons and also hates gender roles.

But I'm just like this
I can't stay still
I am just like your crazy ex
So I wander around and take your sanity
I'm unable to change; Perhaps
You'd understand me if I were a man
But I'm a woman, a woman

Anna Abreu has switched to singing in Finnish! This song is about a woman whose response to her relationship going #DeadBedrooms is to commit some noncon somnophilia:

(I also dig Valheista kaunein ("The Most Beautiful of Lies"), which is imo a cool combo of a more stereotypically Latin music beat with Finnish lyrics.)

In further proof that the Overton window for pop in Finland is deeeefinitely in a different place than in most countries, Paula Vesala, formerly one half of teen pop duo PMMP and now solo careerist, released this song, which is rather heavy for pop: (Pulkka means "sled" or "toboggan")


I also discovered a piece of Finnish history with Seili by Jenni Vartiainen. Seili is an island near Turku which had a ... well, which was a dumping ground for people with leprosy. They had to bring wood for their coffin with them and they were never allowed to leave. Later it was a mental health hospital isolated unit.

In addition to the reasons you've probably heard about (executives going "oh cool AI can do all the entry level jobs!" when it really can't, creative labor being even further devalued, etc), two big ones:

The environment. Training an "AI" consumes absolutely massive amounts of computing power, which means massive water intake to cool the servers. (This applies to all cloud servers, but given how computationally intense "AI" is, asking ChatGPT to answer something is much more of a drain on resources than watching something on Netflix is.)

Labor rights. To produce a usable "AI", one needs to first label the data. ("This is a picture of a cat. This is a picture of a dog." ad infinitum) This is currently done by underpaid workers in e.g. Sub-Saharan Africa. A lot of things we think are automated currently still have a human being checking the automation's work.

This is a nonfiction book about appreciation that came out in January. The title translates to "I See You". I am 99% sure it's never going to be translated into English, but, well. It's very good! I liked the approach it took.

Broadly, it identifies a core problem – there is a chronic lack of appreciation in modern society – and divides its examination into three sections: Why appreciation is not given, Why appreciation is not received, and How to fix this. The definition of appreciation used is twofold: appreciation of achievements ("I am skilled") and appreciation of the self ("I am a lovable part of the community"). It's important that the appreciation be genuine and freely given.

( the cliff notes for the non-Fennophones )

I finished and submitted my themed premiere to vidukon_cardiff and now I have a regular premiere that's mostly done. I simply need to go through all the clip timings (the song has a beat, but it's more of a bzzwot than a snap) and also potentially do color correction. And subtitles. So much stuff. Bleurgh.

Also the new Vidder's Choice rules meant I couldn't have Return to the Sea (DW | AO3) be my vidder's choice submission, so I'm linking it here now.

Will make the typical post-con report on what I submitted to which show plus general remarks. Idk I guess I should practice vid watching, but I currently feel like my brain is Full of Stuff and I cannot absorb anything (see also: how my fic input has dropped to within a rounding error of 0) or produce text. Pretty Pictures Bouncy Music Output is what I can do without pulling teeth. Text? Kinda sorta maybe if I hate myself.

Still looking for a good Rey "rejecting my grandfather's legacy" Palpatine song.

My team got Dxun timer in SWTOR on the first attempt! *\o/*

(For those not in the know: this is the second-hardest raid in the MMO, and you get an achievement for doing it in under 90 minutes. I'm one of the tanks.)

Also, this was like the most terrible set of pulls lol. We even managed to meme on the first boss, and we did not one-shot Trandos, Huntmaster, or Apex. My co-tank also tried to sabotage us by triple stimming himself in burn :D

The Bantam Dxun Reaper is kinda cute, but not as nice as Wings of the Architect imo. It's kind of hilarious that you get two titles out of the timer (Apex Predator and True Apex Predator) because BioWare originally fucked up the code or something, but hey, I'll take it.

We'll finish out the Dxun special achievements next. We're missing the 12 washes one and after that we're heading down to HM to get the other ones. After that, well, I'm down for Gods, but our guild has two prog teams and 3 of our dpses are in the other one as well, which is also going for Gods, and they might not want to prog it four times a week (twice with each team) so let's see. We will also finish up 16-man Dxun NiM at some point.

But today, I celebrate!

- ExtraPenguin, True Apex Predator