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I've recently been on a short story kick, assisted by InkFoundry, who are creating a searchable index of short stories by category and theme.

This was last night's read, a fictional research paper on cheese and prognostication, and I could not help but read the entire thing in Jubal's voice:

"The Efficacy of Tyromancy Over Reflective Scrying Methods in Prediction of Upcoming Misfortunes of Divination Colleagues, A Study by Cresivar Ibraxson, Associate Magus, Wintervale University" by Amanda Helms

30th is fine with me, too

I'm a big fan of VGM arrangements that do more than just play a track with an orchestra, and Merregnon Studios' Symphonic Fantasies concert has been an all-time favourite for me. I was telling someone else about it this evening, and took the excuse to have another listen, and gosh it hits my brain just right

Penblwydd hapus, Exilian!

Especially given the rate of internet churn, it's remarkable for a place to have existed for such a time.

I can absolutely see that, and as usual FromSoft do an exceptionally good job of reusing assets in ways that - at least during playing the game - don't *feel* incongruous, but certainly allow them to make much larger games than they would otherwise be able to afford to.

(The ruined churches - in particular - are neatly handled. They function as sanctuary spaces in terms of gameplay, but they are also named in such a way that they are essentially lore footsteps of a semi-divine pilgrimage of a key deific figure in the game's mythology, and so the similarity of the architecture and so on does make a sort of sense as a "her religion went back to all the places where she rested on her journey and built identical churches on those spots")

Making a real push to finish the rest of these albums by the end of March, so here's the next two:

Mountaintops & Snowfields

Miquella's Haligtree, Branch & Root

Thank you!

In exciting news, my first professionally-published short story just came out! These Hearts, Who Once Held Up the Sky

It's a flash fiction about burnout, managed collapse and finding the road to recovery in the company of others.

I'm particularly grateful to you good Exilians, because this story was inspired by some excellent conversations we had about burnout and recovery back at the Exilian pub last August. It wouldn't be the same story without this community <3

It's Alasdair Stuart's The Full Lid. I know Al from the before-COVID times when I used to go to writing conventions, and he's a wonderful force in the community.

As of yesterday, I crossed the "1000 Elden Ring photos edited" milestone, and I'm rapidly approaching the end of the editing process for the base game.

I'm kinda hoping to be able to wrap up the curation of the base game albums by early April - a year after I started - then I can move on to the DLC in earnest.

In related news, one of my friends has asked to feature a handful of these photos in his weekly newsletter (which has a *significantly* larger reach in SFF circles than I do), which I'm very appreciative of!

Yeah, I really struggled with this album - mostly due to the sheer amount of visual noise - to the point where I got completely waylaid and had to go back post-game and take a bunch more photos to get enough that I was satisfied with.

And I agree, Caelid is definitely in the long standing tradition of FromSoft poison swamps; it has an in-lore rationale of why it turned from a place of fertility to a place riven with rot, but it's never a passing blight. These are places which are fallen to rot in a way beyond recovery.

And of course, even the existence of the poison swamp trope has become an in-joke with creative director Miyazaki, with him gently teasing the playerbase in pre-release interviews about the sheer number of poison swamps he managed to fit in to Elden Ring.

Next photo album is out: The Rot & Ruin of Caelid

I've also put all the photo albums together in a single location, which is organisationally pleasing: Elden Ring Photo Tour

I've submitted my entry too

lodge

cartilaginous