Merry Christmas!

[nanslice]

Belatedly! And Happy Thursday for those who don't celebrate! It was a quiet, lovely day for cypher and me. We broke open the Heroes' Feast DnD cookbook. Will made Amphail Braised Beef and some delicious saffron bread called St. Lucia Buns (they got the recipe from a Scandinavian friend on tumblr). For sides I made Otik's Skillet-Fried Spiced Potatoes, Quith-Pa (an Elven recipe containing apricots and almonds; the original called for coconut but Will's allergic so I subbed in the almonds), and Wood Elf Forest Salad.

We exchanged gifts, which can be summed up as Warhammer + art supplies (for me) and Warhammer + video games (for Will). As always, I wish I could have done more, but they assured me I did enough. I just want to get them all the nice things. ;3;

I finished my assignment for eatdrinkmakemerry and for secretsanguinala and am now working on a gift and a pinch hit for the latter. I don't know what came over me — possibly having a steady job (good, security!) + the state of the world (extremely bad) is combining in a way that's making my brain look for fun productivity — but I'm having a ton of fun working on fandom stuff. :D It probably also helps that I'm working on mostly crack ships and AUs. Also, wrt Secret Sanguinala, it's my fandom's holiday exchange! I want it to be successful and full! Reveals were late Christmas Eve so this last gift is gonna be a little late, but that's okay.

(I drew ABO porn for the first time! what the heck!)

I both love and hate that Steam has a yearly replay similar to Spotify's Wrapped. I love it because, I mean, I'm very sentimental and I love looking back on the year! But I hate it because it's such a magnifying glass on how bad I am at staying on task in games, lmao. Oh well. I'm hoping 2026 is a kinder year in all ways and I'll be able to focus better on hobby things.

........I usually do a little look back on the year but frankly, 2025 SUCKED and I don't want to. It was just a shitty, disheartening, scary year and I understand that there is a lot of privilege to being able to be like, nope, not gonna focus on all that scary stuff, but damn it! I'm tired of focusing on the scary stuff! It's ALL bad! Even news about video games is bad (Larian employees making fun of the gender stuff in BG3, Larian using AI for the character design in Divinity, etc) and it's just. All bad. So I'm looking forward to the future and the things I can control.

Speaking of which, I bought a fancy hardback planner for this year!

The gold is shiny and I'm using different colored pens to help try and keep me on track. As someone notorious for NOT staying on track on goals....I hope I can stick with this, lmao.

Comments

[merit]

I love giving gifts as well. It is nice to know something you went the effort of getting made someone else happy :)

Good luck with the planner!

[nanslice]

This is it exactly! I really enjoy it a lot. I think I'm going to stalk exchange fandom and rather than sign up for stuff, just be a gift giver type. That way there's no actual pressure on me and I can give up if I'm not feeling it (but why would I have picked it up if I'm not feeling it? A valid question).

Thank you very much!

[shanaqui]

Ooh, the planner's pretty! I'm so bad at sticking to that kind of thing but it's always so tempting.

[nanslice]

I'm also so bad at sticking with that kind of thing but I'm hoping it being hardcover helps. That makes sense in my brain, lol.

[mossy_bench]

Crack ships are so, so fun.

Ooh, pretty planner! I hope 2026 is an improvement on a tough 2025.

[nanslice]

They are! Who knows how these characters are going to interact, no one can tell me I'm wrong! XD

Thank you, thank you. Fingers crossed for all of us. <3

[aurel]

Yes, the AI stuff is very disappointing. I was going to check out E33 only to find out they used AI there too. Ough.

I love your planner!! Impeccable taste :)

[nanslice]

I also saw that. :\ However the company heads expanded on this in a French article, translated here:

"The studio states that it was in contact with El País on April 25 - three months prior to this publication. During these exchanges, Sandfall Interactive indicated that it had used a limited number of pre-existing assets, notably 3D assets sourced from the Unreal Engine Marketplace. None of these assets were created using artificial intelligence. Sandfall Interactive further clarifies that there are no generative Al-created assets in the game. When the first Al tools became available in 2022, some members of the team briefly experimented with them to generate temporary placeholder textures. Upon release, instances of a placeholder texture were removed within 5 days to be replaced with the correct textures that had always been intended for release, but were missed during the Quality Assurance process."

So definitely some AI usage early on but supposedly it didn't make it to the game. I think that makes it a little better, although man, just why even mess with it to begin with? idk, I've only heard good things about that game but, like you, hearing about the AI usage really put a damper on it.

Thank you! I like your icon, also impeccable taste. :D

[lassarina]

What a pretty planner! I hope it works well for you.

The ability to not focus on the scary shit, I think, is critically important to putting one's own oxygen mask on first. I can't fix the problems by myself, but I can't do ANYTHING if I'm just gibbering in a corner. So, avoid the things that cause the gibbering and do what I can, is more or less my philosophy at this point.