Richard Grant = The actual “evil Loki”
Sophia Di Martino = The Enchantress, working for Richard Grant
TVA = Actual Baddies, or at least taking them down will be the endgame
Kang the Conquerer = middle time keeper, will be the next phase’s Thanos trying to restore “sacred timeline”

Confidence in these predictions? 65-70%.

-TG

Last night in his Beat Saber stream, Ink Blitz was asking his viewers about their music preferences, and described mine as “’70s, ’80s, and ’90s stuff,” to which I replied “It’s way more than that!”

Of course, his exposure to “my music” comes mostly from the things I request in his streams, plus music I’ve played on my own art streams etc. in the past, so it’s skewed by things like what’s actually available to request, and what suits the mood of the venue. And in those contexts, it’s true that I gravitate mostly towards bubblegum pop or new wave and ’80s alternative. But that just scratches the surface: I have a deep love for ’30s/’40s swing, Japanese city pop (“that anime sound”), baroque and classical (Mrs. Gneech and I have very different opinions on Vivaldi), bossa nova and calypso, and lots more.

The truth of it is that I approach music the same way I approach just about everything else: I look for depth, I explore the weird corners of genre, and I apply that “bringing the awesome” philosophy of searching for things that are better than they need to be. I like glam and putting on a good show, I give preferential treatment to songs that are about more than just “Baby I Loooove You,” and melody is way better than rhythm. I’m not super-into vamping (once I’ve heard a riff three times, I consider that riff done), I think patter must be used sparingly and with a sense of whimsy or not at all (which destroys 90% of rap for me), and I cannot tolerate anything designed to excuse or comfort small-mindedness or deliberate mediocrity (looking at you, most of country-western).

So you might find me listening to Clannad one minute and Cab Calloway the next, then rolling into a Jazz Butcher song that gets followed up by Lady Gaga. So it’s hard to just point at a genre and say “This is my jam.” My jam is the creative process that went into making the music, at least as much as the time period in which it was composed and the medium it was presented in. There are some genres that I’m more drawn to because they embrace those processes more than others (jazz, new wave, etc. all have that counterculture “done because it’s good first and if it makes a buck that’s fine, too” creed), but I can find music to like just about anywhere.

-TG

Putting some thought this morning into the much-mourned LiveJournal. I mean yes, technically LiveJournal still exists, but even if it hadn’t been yucked up by its sale, it was already a ghost of its former self at that point. At its height, LiveJournal combined the experience of a blogging community, an active Twitter feed, and an RSS reader all in one. With powerful community-searching and keywords, and a PAGINATED, CHRONOLOGICAL FEED (*bows and presses hands together at such a wonder*), LiveJournal was a way to connect with your current friends, find new ones, and have as deep or as frivolous a conversation as you wanted without being sabotaged by the algorithm. You could get bot-swarmed by trolls, that’s a danger everywhere on the internet, but there were also tools for dealing with that.

Of course, the problem was that it was expensive to run, and as the airline industry (and just the *#$^ing existence of MS Word) proves, some individuals may be willing to pay for something that doesn’t suck, but people in the aggregate will not pay a single cent for an objectively much better experience if they can get something terrible that does the same job for cheaper or free. And so Facebook, Twitter, and other “you’re the product not the customer” scramble-your-feed-for-pay services flourished, while LiveJournal, where you had to put in your own HTML code and pay for the privilege, did not.

Unfortunately, the 21st century has shown that the nature of modern technology is to start out pretty cool and over time get progressively worse, and social media is no exception. There are still some blogs around, writers banging away stubbornly on their keyboards because that’s who writers are, in the same way that newspaper comic strips technically still exist. But I can’t remember the last time I got involved in a meaningful discussion with a community through them. I gather that Discord (and to a lesser extent Telegram) is the place for that kind of connection, but I’ve never been able to operate in that kind of environment. I like my discussions to be high signal-to-noise and siloed by topic–in a way that I can find and reference later, mind you–but forums are just as moribund as blogs are.

So what to do? Twitter’s own users regularly refer to it as “this hellsite” and lament their own seeming addiction to it. (See also, Hank Green’s recent video, “Is Twitter Redeemable?”)

Facebook is and always has been a dumpster fire, partially due to the technology, but mostly due to the “hate speech is peachy as long as it pays” avarice of its owners. Tumblr is a niche platform that keeps trying to evict its only users. Pillowfort and Dreamwidth are the Good Guys, but they also don’t have the enough of a user base to create and sustain community (and Pillowfort has been plagued by bugs and long term shutdowns). I don’t have an answer; it may be that the journaling format was just a 15-year blip that has gone the way of BBS’s and editorial pages, and I should just let it go.

But I really like it, and I want it to come back.

The Akorithi Twins sell their wares from a market with two flying pennants and walls embedded in other walls. Just an ordinary day in modded Skyrim?

I, am a goofus.

I had Skyrim running, patched and modded all to heck, but running. It was fine. Everything was fine. But something kept annoying me.

Solitude is too damn small.

I mean, the cities in Skyrim have always been little more than a single neighborhood with delusions of grandeur. If you put ALL the Skyrim cities into one place, you’d have something roughly the size of the Village of Bree in Lord of the Rings Online, yes? Skyrim’s cities are stupidly small. I’m used to that.

But not Solitude. I can’t accept it. Solitude is the New York of Skyrim (or possibly the London would be a more apt comparison). It’s supposed to be a major seaport and one the biggest cities in the world, it has no business being one street smaller than some single historical castles. I live near a shopping mall that is literally bigger than Solitude. And since Solitude is where Shady will end up spending most of her time in my “ultimate wishlist playthrough” (long story), I decided to go ahead and mod it up right.

For a long time I ran with Great Cities: Solitude, which definitely beefs up the docks area, but lacks personality. Mostly it adds empty fronts and a few NPCs wandering around. This time I decided I wanted something that felt more alive for all of the cities generally, so I landed on the JK’s Skyrim + Dawn of Skyrim combo (with some additional mods for other towns), with Solitude Expansion to add some life to the docks. That helped, but it still wasn’t quite there, maybe 65-70%.

And then, I looked at Enhanced Solitude. This is a mod that basically takes a baker’s dozen of the modder’s favorite Solitude mods by disparate authors, rearranges them into something like a cohesive whole, and also adds a whole new neighborhood as well as expanding and redecorating the existing ones. In short, if you want Solitude to feel alive, Enhanced Solitude is the one you actually want.

Have you ever been to a city that DIDN’T have signs promoting shops? But I’ve never seen it in a fantasy RPG before. This one detail sold me on Enhanced Solitude.

(The same author has a docks mod intended to go with it, which includes elements of Solitude Expansion, and it’s nice but buggy and, well, the author is not exactly helpful about it.)

Unfortunately, Enhanced Solitude is not compatible with the JK/Dawn combo. Like, at all. As shown in the top image, combining them adds duplicate NPCs, artifacts all over the place, it’s a mess. Of course, this is only really a problem in the overlapping parts of the city (i.e., the market)—the new areas added by Enhanced Solitude are fine. The author provides a “patch” that essentially tears out the JK/Dawn stuff by the roots… but that also breaks Dawn of Skyrim’s changes to other cities (“Hmm, why are half the textures in Whiterun broken all of a sudden?”).

I don’t want that. I want the mods to play nice together. I could go through and manually delete offending items and clone NPCs in the game via console commands, but that could lead to instability and would be instantly negated if I ever ran an update. No, the only “right” way to merge these mods and have it stick, would be to create a patch. And so began my descent into modding tools. If I could just “suppress” or hide/undo the parts of Enhanced Solitude that conflicted with JK/Dawn, I’d have the best of both worlds! And what’s more, I could upload the patch to Nexus and let all the other people who want the best of both worlds to share in my handiwork.

A week later, I’ve dug into SSEedit, Creation Kit, even looked at editing models in Nifscope. I’ve watched tutorial videos on YouTube until my head spun… and at the end of the day nothing to show for it but a file called “Enhanced JK’s Dawn of Solitude” that… doesn’t actually do anything. It’s not that I couldn’t figure this out eventually if I was willing to keep banging my head against it, but the real question is… why am I doing this?

Is one more neighborhood for my digital catgirl to mostly never go to, really worth staying up until the wee hours night after night for?

It’s a nice little neighborhood, it’s got a bath-house and a bookstore… but will my experience of playing Shade-Of-the-Candle really be that much better for it? I can delete the extra actors and random junk around town with the “disable” command and have a mostly-working town that just has a few bottlenecks of idle markers where they don’t belong. I could have done that three days ago and been actually playing the game. Why am I fighting with this? Or for that matter, I had my 65-70% without Enhanced Solitude at all, why not be content with that. I have art commissions, writing, job hunting to do… all of which are infinitely more important than making a fictional town that’s not even mine seem just a little less fictional.

Hyperfocus? Perfectionism? Pure mule-headedness? I dunno. Maybe part of me thought getting into modding might lead to some kind of creative outlet that wasn’t as frustrated as my writing and art have been of late, but that hope is forlorn I suspect.

But all that said, if there’s anyone out there who IS experienced at modding and knows what they’re doing, who’d like to walk me through the process of making these changes I want, please let me know! ‘cos I think I’ve hit a wall with my current understanding and have no idea what to do next.

Thank goodness SOMEBODY did. >.>

Anyway! Welcome to 2021, and let the un-suckening begin!

I’m moved, and for the time being at least I’m going back to full-time on my art and writing, which means that things should start picking up around here again! Thanks to all of you for being patient while I was digging out from the hole I’d fallen in.

My first order of business will be to clean up the commission queue! I still owe a few people commissions from October OR their Winter 2020 SUPPORT TIER OF CANGREJO DIABLO Patreon image, and January is going to be spent making sure all of those get done before I take on any new business.

For STofCD-level subscribers, Spring 2020 slots will open up as soon as I finish that, so probably February. :)

(And if you’d like to get in on some of that Patreon action, here: https://www.patreon.com/the_gneech )

My next priority will be to get Reclamation Project: Year Two edited and off to FurPlanet. Submissions are still coming in, so if you are in-progress or near completion, go ahead and finish off your story and send it. I don’t know how much I’ve got yet, but there’s probably room for at least one or two more good stories!

Following that we’ll see where we are, but I have two big projects I’d like to take on this year:

1) FINISH ROUGH HOUSING FINALLY, GEEZE, and

2) A SUPER-SECRET PROJECT WITH SHADE-OF-THE-CANDLE.

I realize that shouting in all caps about a super-secret project seems a little weird, but that’s just how I roll, babe.

So here’s looking forward to a year that doesn’t suck! We might even (gasp) be able to go to conventions again! C’mon, vaccine! :D

And thanks for coming along with me, friends. You rock!

As I post from the basement of my sister’s house, looking at boxes containing my books and trying for the umpteenth time to figure out SOMEWHERE to put the rest of my desk, I feel more than a little like the Whos of Whoville, waking up to discover that the Grinch had stolen Christmas.

With all funds allocated to the move, we have zero presents to give anyone this time around, which feels even worse when I think about how generous so many people have been to us. Dasher’s absence still jumps out from behind the couch and makes us sad when we’re trying to do other things. Having spent the past month in a marathon of long hours at dayjob and then movingMovingMOVINGMOVING!!! I am exhausted, lonely, and burned out.

But today, I am going to stop, and breathe, and refocus, and think about things I love.

Welcome Christmas, while we stand, heart to heart and hand in hand.