the Isle of Last Words

This blog is mostly oriented for my creative writing projects, including on-topic rambling about said writings, general writing advice and resources, and the sharing of other storytellers’ plights. There’s a bit of visual art, some fun stuff, some life advice, a smidgen of this and that. I try to keep the amount of politics low.

My current main piece of work is Opposing Colours, part 1 of Do You Think Sharks Have Feelings? It is a story about two people meeting, learning to get along, and eventually forgetting how to live without one another. It’s also something of a story about a fall from grace, a descent into madness — that sort of thing. We’re getting there. It’s based in the Sea of Thieves universe with all of its deceptively deep lore, partially thanks to my years-long hyper-fixation on it. It explores that world from the point of view of someone who knows very little of it to start with, though, so I feel it’s fandom-blind friendly or can be read more as an original piece than fan fiction. Its tag here on the blog is DYTSHF.

I’ve also had a life-long love of the Sonic The Hedgehog franchise and grew up in its darkest times, leading to some... slightly skewed views on the franchise. From that has sprung an alternate universe (AU) project of mine centering around Mephiles the Dark. While I don’t have anything of this posted, I have spoken a little bit about it, and it is something I am quietly working on to soon post. I have a somewhat unrelated one-shot where hints of this AU can be gleamed, though. This project’s series is A Fractured Reality and its tag here is AFR.

I primarily maintain my stuff on Archive of our Own. I also have a SquidgeWorld Archive account for redundancy. I’m not sure why I bother maintaining a fanfiction.net account. For some reason I don’t really outright post my stuff here and only occasionally post little things (dash / blog).

If you’re more interested in what I’m doing precisely, check out my rambling tag (dash / blog) or say hi. I don’t bite!

This feels even more necessary now as I’m not sure AO3 differentiates between <b> and <strong> very well, but I know I could do that in a manually edited ePub I can make myself. Which, that isn’t all that important, but the difference between <i> and <em> is, as ships names are supposed to be italicized to my understanding, but there’s a difference between noting a ship name and someone <em>emphasising</em> a word in their mental breakdown.

I think Extinction will forever stay the most... impressive?... moment to me. I don’t want to get into the super nitty gritty about why I think that, both because I don’t want to spoil the details for anyone with any interest in ARK’s (explorer notes) story, but also because it’s been a very long time since I immersed myself in them and my memory can be finicky.

But despite that, I’ve never been able to shake how impactful it felt to me. ARK did something that no other media has managed to do to me, and that was impressing upon me, as a player character, that I am important. This all depends on me. I think some of that impression has to do with having played ARK from about a year after release, so when they started putting story stuff in, I was there and ready to consume it, so I’ve sort of been there from that specific start.

The ARKs exist because the planet Earth below is sick. The ARKs are life boats in space. They are humanity’s solution to this problem. Ride out the storm to live another day and fix the planet when possible at a later date.

It’s a story that’s easy to simplify, easy to mess up, but they do it so well; the non-Genesis plotline is incredible in those notes. It’s full of hope, determination, love and chaos and death. And at the end of the day, the only one who can help someone see this to the end is us. It’s even done in a way that doesn’t really feel too weird if you have friends with you, but it’s still you that’s the important part.

ARK generally handles its bosses quite well, IMO; they have three difficulties, Gamma/Beta/Alpha, but that final boss is a bit different. Beta is actually the hardest boss in the whole game because the Alpha fight gives you access to a unique tool to complete it; it trivializes the fight, even. And this is a very hard fight; it’s in the open world so there’s essentially no rules. It’s such a clusterfuck that you’re expected to have tribtemates or even whole other tribes there to fight alongside you. It can be done solo, plenty of people have proved this, but with everything going on, with the music that’s not quite like anything else in the game... the idea is that it’s a war.

I am also in a massive mood to play ARK again because one of the best DLCs just got its remaster release. Then again, I think I am so excited not because of it and what has come with it but rather more so it marks that Genesis Part 2 comes next and that was the really juicy one of the two. Which is insane to say, right, ‘cause both of them revolutionized the game when they came out.

Or rather, perhaps I am simply in an ARK mood. There was the new DLC that I haven’t touched yet and apparently there were some new things going on and some apparent retconning of things. Which makes things really interesting ‘cause I’m wondering if it’s world-building lore or if it’s the story they’ve got going on, ‘cause if it’s the former, then we might have some issues with that DYTSHF? related story I wanted to do for it. I could always say fuck it and all but I’m also a sucker for wiggling things into being compliant with canon. I guess we’re gonna find out on that?

I may also just refresh myself on pre-Ascended lore — there’s plenty of videos for that and all — and go with what I’ve already got plot-pointed out.