9/9/2025
August was over before I even realized it!
Truthfully, I don't feel like I accomplished much. I finished the Iliad, and ever since it's mostly been freefall. I've been putting off starting on the Odyessy so soon mostly because I wanted to focus on binge-reading web novels on Royal Road. Here's a few I'm reading right now:
And recently, I finished On Foreign Soils We Die. It had an interesting premise where a whole lotta Earth's people are isekai'd and train to become supersoldiers writing in a fantasy world war for a human kingdom, their main enemy? Lizardfolk with enough industrialized firepower it would put all the shitflinging happening in a certain Eastern European country seem trivial, and the lizards are still losing on a front the humans deem not so tactical.
Here's my review of it.
Here's a premise you don't see done often: A fantasy world war where one of the nations have a whole batch of isekai'd supersoldiers at their disposal to wreck havoc upon their enemies, even if that enemy has access to WW2-era weaponry and are lizard-like humans.
Generally, I'm not one big on litrpgs. But I appreciated the way the author managed to interweave it so well into the prose and all things considered it's a light system that doesn't take up too much space in the story or pacing but doesn't feel tacked on. It's almost minimalistic and there are cases where the characters themselves get annoyed and swipe away hud notifications occasionaly, often for grim effect.
This story is rather grim. It's not exatly grim dark but it does deal with some pretty serious themes when it comes to total war and makes you question who is right or wrong in conflict. War isn't exactly all it is cracked out to be, so the author does a great job portraying war for what it is really is (except with magic).
The magic system is cool but like the lore and the litrpg system itself, it's minimalistic, with only vague but still very interesting concepts I hoped would've been expanded on, but man... once you reach the final chapter, the story ends and it leaves you hungry for more. Over all, this story exceeded my expectations and I feel the author did great justice in portraying the various characers on either side of the conflict.
Story is completed
The Travelers. People from earth reincarnated in the country of Aetheria, powerful and skilled users of the System who have arrived in this early modern world just in time to aid Aetheria against the many foes and threats facing them. They can and will transcend all powers of this world in order to make their adoptive home country safe.
This is not their story.
This is the story of the Scaverians, a people at war with the expansionist power of Aetheria and the otherworldly people known as the Travelers, their grand superweapon. Ever since they refused to stop supplying the Aethereans with weapons and tools for their conquest, the Aethereans have been dedicated to driving them underground.
Their deities and elder dragons are dead. Their last great fortress line has fallen. The only thing protecting them now is the gargantuan Malden river, and that they are considered an unimportant front by the Aethereians. Now, they have one final plan. A concerted blow with the remaining nations still fighting, targeting the one advantage the Aethereans have.
For one scrapped-together regiment of Scaverians, their target is five Travelers, relatively weak, inexperienced, and on leave in the rural town of Halice.
It is an operation few are expected to return from.
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Real fascinating story. It's rather short too—the author's newer work is over 2k pages long. But I will probably not read it.
The next stories I want to dive in next are The knight, the dragon and the necromancer, and A Test of Knives. Like the above these are free stories you can read on Royal Road. I have a lot more in my actual Read List (some are in my reading page here) but I won't link them here. I'm lazy.
Beside reading, I finally got to experience MGS3 Delta. I was concerned at first over its performance but the game ran nearly flawlessly. The only caveats I had was the last phase of the Volgin Shagohad fight in the open arena. Since the game was originally 30fps on ps2, I think 60fps was making it lag out like, turbo crazy. I only had 2 crashes in the whole game, so it was just great all around.
MGS3 was nearly my whole childhood growing up, so I had practicallly a lot to lose. So, props to the Konami team for honoring Kojima. Kojima is a bit of a loser and stubborn to give it a try. Can I blame him? It'd be if like, someone took Saga of the Cosmic Heroes, and basically rewrote it all so it's not garbage. Would I read it? Maybe...
Anyway, I loved the game. I played it in Jap dub because I never had the chance to do so (not even with 4 now I think a bout it). Hearing the Jap dub for the first and only time was phenomenal! It makes me want to replay 2, 4, and 1 with the audio, it's practically a whole different layer to the game.
I'm tempted to do another playthrough with Legacy controls on, say, Hard. But I haven't brought myself to do it yet. Anyway, I really hope Konami tries a Remake of PW after this, or even MGS2/1. It would be very interesting for Konami to do a full-on remake of MG1 and MG2. But for now, after finishing MGS4 earlier this year, I had my taste of the snake pie. There really isn't any more video games for me to stick with anymore. The mystial xbox huge game backlog was conquered. All that's left is to write.
Write.... yeah.
I simply just haven't been writing. I keep making excuses for myself and it worries me the Ashwagandha formula I'm trying isn't up to snuff. Maybe it's weaker than the store brand I bought?
The more I read, the less confidence I get in actually writing. It stings. It haunts me. Already I'm feature creeping what I want to include in A Game of Cosmic Titans. I've been toying with expanding the opening chapters so it starts with Yellow Typhoon but from Lawrence's perspective—but how much do I adapt? The very beginning, when Lawrence enters Victoria's cockpit for the first time? Or a little later, when he catches up to her after she took on the last of Churchill's flotilla? To what lengths do I need to go to make the reader drawn to and attached to Victoria, to feel Lawrence's tragedy?
The short answer: I can't. It's not possible. I'm the target audience and boy is it a empty theater. It's practically maddening. I look at comments for Phantom Star, Max Level Archmage... and I just feel sad I can never cultivate a following like that. Their writing is top-notch, crisp, the characters are likable... it's just pain. I can't write fast enough and I can't do justice with my writing. At the end of the time, at the acute bottom like, I'm a baby shrimp struggling to stir fry rice for the ghosts of Homer and Frank Herbert. It's so exceedingly difficult getting people to care about your writing.
It still weighs on my mind if I should even bother with serializing in the first place. On a forum I opined it is worth to finish the whole book before actually serializing to which I was rebuffed: "If you're just going to write it all anyway, why not just self/trad–pub?"
And it really does just roll around in my mind palace like a pinball. Serials or full-published, there's no appetite for space opera epics like mine(or in other words Legend of the Galactic Heroes). It's just pain. Where does my writing belong? Maybe this story doesn't need to exist after all. It's already been told. I can lie to myself about it having Temu discount newtypes and cool fancy mechas but they're just window dressing because it's still LotGH but very, very condensed.
Maybe I should just fall in-line and worry a no-brainer isekai litrpg like everyone else, slap on a ai-gen image. But that's the thing, I just want to write LotGH. I typecasted myself into not being able to write anything else... coming up with a story and a ending is just exceedingly difficult. I did my fair share writing 400k words for Saga of the Cosmic Heroes and I just can't go through that again, not even with a outline this time.
Sigh...
It's kind of morbid. I have 690 followers on my VRC Twitter and my fat anime tiddy selfies get far more engagement than my writing ever could. I posted a tweet advertising Yellow Typhoon with my avatar once on both YT and Twitter and it gained no traction... it's frustrating. I can't lie when I say it makes me disillusioned.
Well... sulking aside. Changing gears to anime. This season's been solid. My boyfriend and I have been blazing through the Legend of the Galactic Heroes ova, we're on episode 64. Good, solid stuff as always. We watched Urotsukidōji: Legend of the Overfiend, but it was late when we saw it and fell asleep on the 2nd chapter/episode, but it's actually a very interesting work.
Anime aside, we've been making good progress in FF11. That's about it for updates so far. I'm running out of steam. Thanks for reading.
