Babylon 5 Femslash

what's up? well, I've finally recovered a bit. I'm not quite at my normal long COVID baseline but I'm not too bad. the pollen really did a number on me one to two weeks ago too but I am now permanently full of antihistamines as well. anyway, I had a lot of lying around time as a result so here's some rambling about fiction that I was occupying myself with.

I played/read Chaos;Child - one of the Science Adventure series and (ehhh kind of) a sequel to Chaos;Head. I played Chaos;Head maaaany years ago, before there was any official translation, so I never played Chaos;Head NOAH and consequently didn't see the routes and additional ending/s in that. well, it didn't matter a huge amount because I needed to read through the basic synopsis - I only remembered that I enjoyed it and liked the paranoid atmosphere. Chaos;Child was also a compelling story and I liked some of the characters a lot. on the downside, the way it was structured was actively bad. you're pretty much locked into a single route on the first playthrough and then you can diverge into four character routes which are largely pointless by comparison. yeah you get to explore characters a bit more but man does it feel like a de-escalation after the common route. THEN, when you're done with those, you unlock the true end which really only has relevance to the common route again. they have a good main story, I just have no idea why they decided to structure it like this! (and apparently the translation I played is also a bit lacking, which I could sometimes hear when comparing the Japanese spoken dialogue lines. it was on the Switch so I couldn't use the fan patch.) anyhow: it was worth it. looking back at my rating of Chaos;Head on VNDB on an account I started in 2009, I also wonder how I'd rate a lot of things on there today.

I also finally played Master Detective Archives: Rain Code right after. it was visually very pretty, had a nice cast of characters, and a plot I was generally interested in uncovering. unfortunately, the gameplay can get pretty tedious... very tedious. it was more arduous than I remember the Dangan Ronpa games being, with the disclaimer that I played them a while ago and only remember some of the mechanics. but for example, there were a couple of cases where I already understood everything that happened before getting to the mystery solving gameplay section and it had basically no impact on my performance compared to the cases I didn't know all the answers to. so I guess what I'm saying is that half the gameplay is just gimicky instead of giving you the satisfaction of solving a puzzle, which is not great for someone who doesn't love action games. I got a free DLC that I haven't played yet, although I heard they're just ~45min linear stories so I'll see how it is before looking into the other DLC stories. anyway: Halara, Vivia, and Yakou were my faves and the bits that didn't feel like a slog were fun.

I finished the audio book of Agatha Christie's Crooked House too, which is one of a vanishing number of Agatha Christie novels I haven't heard or read before (...that I can remember, anyway). I usually listen to audiobooks in short bursts while I'm lying in bed at night so it's hard to really judge a story that I hear when my brain is half asleep but I think it was one of her good ones. I have no idea what I'll do when I run out of Agatha Christie audio books read by Hugh Fraser. I may have already run out - I'll have to check!

I have also been reading a bit of non-fiction, which I guess I'll post about some other time. I have eternal executive function issues but I really don't want to be a dummy who doesn't read, so I'm trying to harness direct my energy because I think it's important. I've never been good at getting stuff done BUT I did have enough enthusiasm to do all my readings back when I did most of a humanities and social sciences degree so I just gotta channel that.