like a star, like a firefly

My computer died last week.

It was nine years old, so it was inevitably going to happen at some point (especially what with it being Windows 8.1, which I hear stopped getting security updates at the end of last month) but it still went downhill more suddenly than I was expecting. Fortunately I have not lost my stuff -- I got it all backed up on to my external drive in time -- but the computer itself is unusable now.

I'm on a basic laptop right now, which is at least enough to do the essentials on; I don't know when I'll be able to get another decent computer, but I'm pretty sure it won't be anytime particularly soon. There's some things I miss already, like being able to make more icons, but I'll just have to do without them for the time being.

I was at least able to watch last week's Nintendo Direct live, though! Off the top of my head: the new Rain Code trailer was expected but very welcome all the same, more stuff on Engage DLC was cool (plus the free update adding Recreation was a godsend), DecaPolice looked interesting, and remasters for both Baten Kaitos games were a nifty surprise.

Not all bad news, then! Still some bad news -- right now I'm worried my car might be on its way out too -- but at least there's a bit of silver lining on all these clouds.

The good thing about Engage having a photo mode is that when characters I ship don't stand close enough together in their support conversations or other actual interactions to make decent icons out of them, I still have the ability to more-or-less make my own food.

The "food" here (this specific icon [or more accurately the version of it I had at the time of making this post; the lighting on the character models was a bit weird-looking]) might not be the best, but hey, it's something.

Got Fire Emblem Engage!

First impressions will come later as I've only just beaten Chapter 2's map so far, but for now I'll just say that the OP song is shounen as heck and kind of charming for it.

Picked girl!Alear, by the way.

Turn rewind mechanics like Mila's Turnwheel and Divine Pulse are a quality-of-life feature that 100% deserve to be a part of modern Fire Emblem games.

Ever spent a long time on a single map, only for something to go horribly wrong right at the end? I hated having to start the entire map over from scratch when that happened while playing the older games, especially when it rendered the long time I'd already spent on it totally wasted. Having turn rewind in such circumstances helps save that time, and really, nowadays players shouldn't be forced to restart from scratch just because one thing went wrong near the end of an otherwise well-enough-played map; things don't have to be the same now as they were 20+ years ago.

Moreover, I think people who are completely against turn rewind don't have much empathy for players who, y'know, have lives outside of playing games and therefore don't necessarily have tons of free time to bash their heads over and over on one map in one game. That's why I've believed for a good while now that Casual mode also very much has a right to exist in this series, and I say that as someone who still plays on Classic!

I can understand people thinking Three Houses gives a tad too many uses of Divine Pulse, but that's the only concession I'll make. Turn rewind is a good thing, I'm glad it's confirmed to be coming back in Engage, and I hope it stays in every new FE game going forward.

And to anyone who is violently allergic to it being a thing: don't bloody use it then! It's optional, for crying out loud!

Guess who now has the entire legendary quartet in Pokémon Violet? \o/

Just managed to find and catch a shiny Greavard, by pure chance! (I need to get or make a Greavard icon, actually. It's so cute, and I always feel charmed whenever I see one pop out of the ground.)

I've only gotten a very small handful of shinies across the entire series, so it always feels even better when the shiny is of a Pokémon I like. :3

Another Engage trailer! I saw the Japanese version yesterday, but the English version just dropped today.

I figured we'd get a gameplay-oriented trailer next, but I didn't expect one so soon after last week's story trailer!

Pokémon Violet GET! \o/

I've literally just started playing, and I've spent most of my first couple of hours wandering around and catching a bunch of Pokémon before the first Centre, but I'm having fun already. :3

I chose Fuecoco as my starter, by the way.

From Sara again:

Gimme a fandom and I'll tell you:

01. The first character I fell in love with
02. The character I never expected to love as much as I do now
03. The character everyone else loves that I don't
04. The character I love that everyone else hates
05. The character I used to love but don't any longer
06. The character I would shag anytime
07. The character I'd want to be like
08. The character I'd slap
09. A pairing that I love
10. A pairing that I hate

I haven't forgotten about the other recent meme! It's just taking me a while to put together good collections of sentences to respond with, plus one of the ships I was given is something I won't be able to properly write about for a long time anyway because I have yet to play the one route it's available on. ^^;

I can't believe "Toothpaste Emblem" turned out to be real. ^^; I'd seen the leak for it before, but had never been sure how to take it. It's coming out surprisingly soon, too... I'll see how it is, though I'll miss Fódlan and I was honestly sad to not see anything about Hopes DLC.

In other news, yay Rain Code, yay new Octopath Traveler, and yay for the new Zelda game finally having an actual title to go with its release date.

I love that Hopes has lots of new supports between pairs of characters who didn't previously get supports together in Houses, including some pairs that fans (myself included in some cases) had been wanting for years.

Still, there'll always be some potential that gets missed, because that's inevitable when we've got so many characters in a big fully-voiced script like this... so I just felt like throwing together a list of character pairs that didn't support in either game that I personally would've really liked to see. This isn't a criticism of the games' support choices at all -- just a "this would've been neat" sort of thing.

( Does it count as spoilers to list off some supports we didn't get? Also mentions a couple of supports that do happen in the game )

For the record, I went ahead and spoiled myself on who supports whom in Hopes around the time I was finishing my SB run, though I naturally didn't spoil myself on the conversations themselves.

While there's a good number of conversations between Houses/Hopes characters I'd love to see that will probably never happen outside of fanfic (whether or not that fanfic currently exists), there's one in particular that I've suddenly got a bit of a hankering for.

( Spoilers for Scarlet Blaze; CW for mentions of CSA and human experimentation that may-or-may-not get discussed further )

I'd have a go at writing the fic myself, but I don't know how well I could pull it off...