Am I an author? Is that what I am? I don’t remember writing anything, though. That was probably some other cat.
Only Each Other (どうせ二人ぼっち) is a yuri one-shot included in yrhm Yurihime 20th Anthology (yrhm 百合姫 20th アンソロジー). It’s more of a vignette than a short story, I suppose, a peak into a yuri setup that doesn’t go anywhere. It portrays a sort of angsty relationship between a popular girl and a gloomy girl very well. It’s 100% vibes, easy 7/10.
I Got Reincarnated as a Minor Character and I Won’t Give Up on TS (かませ役 ♂ に憑依転生した俺はＴＳを諦めない) is a gender-bender yuri urban fantasy web novel about a “man” who, despite “his” wishes to be reincarnated as girl, is reincarnated as a minor villain in what seems to be a shounen manga. It actually baffles me that this series was seemingly uploaded to Kukuyomu instead of Syosetu, given that the protagonist is reincarnated as a character named Narou Kei. For those out of the loop, Narou-kei refers to the style of web novels found on the site Syosetu ni Narou; basically, any time you thought a series kind of felt like an isekai but wasn’t actually an isekai, you were probably just picking up on it being Narou-kei. The world of the series is that urban fantasy setup where dungeons pop up throughout the world, needing to be conquered before they expand out into the real world, with the story taking place on an island controlled by schools that research and conquer these dungeons. Throughout all this. Kei is determined to become a girl, specifically a “mysterious beauty,” despite the circumstances of her reincarnation. There’s a lot of acting as if she knows what’s going on, perhaps just playing up what she knows from the “original” manga, to meet that “mysterious” criteria, whereas the rest is handled with cross-dressing and/or magic. Along the way, she gains a weapon in the form of a scythe which she contracts with, essentially filling the “system” trope, as the scythe supports her particularly transgender form of chuunibyou. Perhaps my favorite bit in all this is that Kei is a staunch believer that men getting in the way of yuri is a sin; any time she isn’t in “mysterious beauty” form, she considers getting close to her classmates to be worthy of nothing short of a death penalty. I’ve read to ch. 105 thus far, giving this a decent 6/10 (though that might just be biased low due to my inability to focus on anything lately).
Correction to my last report, there has been news on Thaumcraft from Team CoFH, 4 months ago. Also, it is closed-source so I wouldn’t be able to port it myself anyway. If working on my own mod goes well, and I get comfortable with the language and features of modern Minecraft mods, I might consider requesting to join the team working on it. The FAQ about Thaumcraft VII says that they’ve had very little success getting contributions from new people brought in on it, so I’d like to make sure that it’s something I’m absolutely capable of before attempting.
I’ve decided that, at least once Thaumcraft VII is released, I’m just going to develop my own modpack. We sort of did this before, but that was more curating mods than it was developing a pack. I have a couple of justifications for myself to do this. First off, I’ve been working on updating Isabella II and want to give it some mod coverage as well; developing the resourcepack alongside a modpack would give me a better scope for what mods I need to give coverage and what I don’t. Second, there’s just a lot of really dumb mods that every pack developer for some reason believes to be necessary, such as YUNGNICKYOUNG’s various structure mods (I especially dislike the Desert Temples one). Third, much of what I want to add in my own mod is essentially just additions to existing mods, which makes more sense in the context of building my own modpack. Finally, every other modpack developer is a fucking coward. We can seemingly all agree that having ten varieties of silver ore is absurd, and a combination of certain mods, registries, and scripts is used to avoid that in modpacks; however, one could reasonably argue that it is rather realistic to have many varieties of ores for one metal and specific processing being required to make them interchangeable. Yet, having a hundred different cables for electricity, a dozen different item pipes or conveyor belts, and a handful of different fluid pipes is just the norm? Not on my watch! I want a universal solution to this! I also want to control the progression of mods a bit, with certain technology mods requiring other technology mods to start on. Crafting a “metal plate” with an ingot and hammer? Absurd!
After some thinking on it, I’ve come to the conclusion that TerraFirmaCraft would be the best baseline for progression. Then, after discussing with Hermea, realized that TerraFirmaGreg might actually be the best modpack to work off of for my own. I would like a few more cosmetic mods, like furniture and the like, added in, plus I really don’t know how I feel about things like Immersive Aircraft… maybe Valkyrien Skies would be a better fit?
My continuation on Isabella has been going alright. I realized that a lot of the existing continuation work just doesn’t fit my intentions with the pack, such as how most stone types are simply recolored stone. There’s also the way all the wood is meant to be slight variations in tone, rather than the more whimsical coloring of vanilla wood types (acacia is orange, mangrove is red, warped is cyan, &c.). I made some progress on updating it to 1.19 before I got distracted with trying to fix up some of those issues, which led down another dumbass rabbit hole of trying to extend the CTM compatibility to the alternative mod Fusion. Maybe it was just my install that was having issues, or maybe its the 1.19.2 version entirely, but I couldn’t get other examples to load, couldn’t get my textures to work, and overall just hate how Fusion has its own custom formatting for CTM. Anyway, I’ll have to reevaluate my testing setup before trying to continue on this.
Overall, this was one of those weeks where I couldn’t focus on doing any particular thing for long. I’ve been working on my worldbuilding map a bit, at least.