Let's talk Animal Crossing: New Horizons .
I love it. I love it a lot. I just got my second house expansion set up and so tomorrow I'll have a SECOND ROOM tomorrow, just in time for the 3rd of my new residents to move it. I'm very proud of my avoiding any and all peppy potential residents. They are.....a lot and I can't handle them. I'm going to keeping one residential plot open for cycling through the personalities I don't like until I get through all of them, at which point it'll just be normals, uchis, and lazies. Oh, and Rosie. She's allowed. Gotta have at least one cat.
I've gone through all the stages of grief about the turnip stalk market. I think it just makes me angry because I hate the stock market in real life and I want to watch that particular part of the world burn to the fucking ground. BUT I also want to finish upgrading my house and I just learned it costs 50,000 bells to move buldings and I have been planning to massively overhaul how my island is laid out. I want to have 3 neighborhoods as well as a shopping district around the resident arena space. Then I'm gonna have my house in a different location becuase just like in real life, game me is a recluse. Maybe I'll let one resident live by me. So I can have 3 three resident "neighborhoods" because I also like things to be even because I'm ridiculous. Or I'll just have 2 three resident areas and 1 four resident area. I dunno. I really like Lucy. Maybe she can be my perma-neighbor.
I am trying to decide if I'm going to put my house in the southeast beach corner, cos it also has a dock right there and I love it. The other possible locale is on top of a plateau covered with cedar trees which I like becuase it's secluded. But I also think this could be a really good location for a little 3-house neighborhood. I'll probably do that.
I made a couple of patterns that I uploaded on this animal crossing pattern tool website, which is super fun! I did a Neon Genesis Evangelion NERV leaf and the Destiny hunter snake. I may retouch the NERV one because I didn't realize it was going to show up on both the front and back of my shirt. Whoops, lol. It's fun tho. I'm digging doing the pixel art. The only bummer is I have to have my laptop on to display the QR code, my phone on to read it, and my switch to receive it. Kind of tedious, honestly. But it only lets you upload one QR at a time until you put them into the editor, and you can't put them into the pro editor which is also weird? I don't know, I'm still muddling through, but it's still fun.
[By the by, if you want to be Switch Friends, send me an email with your Switchy Codey and I'll friend you up! I will NEVER share your info with strangers, and will ensure immediate of destruction of your info upon adding it to my Switch.]
C.J. Cherryh is such an astonishing writer. I read Downbelow Station a few years ago and it was phenomenal. I also read The Faded Sun trilogy a couple years back. I started reading Cyteen over a year ago. She is a tough read. She demands so much of the reader. Her style of limited third person perspective is one that pushes the reader to question everything that characters think and believe, because they just Don't Know beyond what they do know, and it is amazing. She spins political intrigue in a way that makes GRRM look like an amateur. She introduces horrendous actions by characters in a way that is both far more realistic and simultaneously not salacious in a way that I just don't think straight, white men will ever figure out.
In Cyteen she provides us with all of this AND with main characters that are gay. And it won the Hugo. In 1989. And didn't shy away from it. Didn't nod or wink to it. Refers to them specifically and presents them as totally within social norms. Provides many instances of a broader normalcy of sexualities than what is normed even now. So much world building is in what is NOT remarkable within a system as well as what is. It is worth noting that Cherryh herself is a lesbian, and has been with her wife for many years. She's writing from within.
I also want to give mad kudos for how her women and men aren't stereotypes or the inverse stereotypes employed by folks pretending to be beyond the norm. Men are broken, women are complicated, and no one fits into a paradigm and it is lovely.
I don't want to talk too much about the contents of the book itself. Every moment of it is predicated on the moment before, and 1) I'll retell it poorly, and 2) it would blunt the power of the narrative. It's fucking FASCINATING. She is so clued into sociology and human interaction and the only author in her class is Le Guin in this arena.
I know that her writing later seems to have fallen off. I am hesitant to read Regenesis as much as I want a sequel to Cyteen because I have founded fears about her ability to pull of the amazing writing of her earlier career. I mean, I'll still read it, but I'm managing my expectations.