enchantedsleeper

Taking advantage of the fact that I have a hacked 3DS to try out Pokemon fan games! There's a thriving Pokemon romhacking community where they take base Gameboy/Gameboy Advanced games and edit them, sometimes making entirely new storylines and regions.

This one is a blend of Pokémon, Etrian Odyssey and Made in Abyss. The base game is FireRed, which I've never played.

Here's the description:

On an island in the middle of the sea stands a massive maze known as the "Yggdrasil Labyrinth", which has been attracting adventurers from all over the world for years.
No one knows how deep it goes, or if there's anything at its end.

Some say there's a treasure of immeasurable value hidden within, while others claim the remnants of a lost civilization lie there.

In the game you'll play as Nyx, a young adventurer who joins the guild of Talrega with the goal of unraveling the Labyrinth's mysteries.

But something goes terribly wrong…

The gameplay is heavy on Pokemon with the world setting and some mechanics (like Etrian's F.O.E. bosses) from the other games. So you collect and battle Pokemon as usual, but the storyline is focused on exploring the labyrinth (and the ocean, which has mysterious islands to find) and doing sidequests. There's no Team Rocket or evil organization to defeat, nor gym leaders or champions. Likewise, there's no map to fill out like in Etrian games.

I'm about 4 hours into it and just about ready to progress to the second Labyrinth level! I'm really enjoying it so far. They've done an amazing job making "Etrian variant" Pokemon (which you can see here) and the game design is really fun.

The only thing I'm a little iffy on is they give you a "team" of two other characters, and then they don't do anything. They don't help with battles, or even explore the labyrinth with you! I'm guessing they're re-skinned rival characters from the base game (I didn't look it up) which makes more sense for how they act in THIS game.

Anyway, a bonus for me: the thing I'm using to play GBA roms on my 3DS apparently sucks up WAY less battery than the regular 3DS software. It's not an emulator, it's using hte 3DS hardware/software to run the ROM directly. Sooooo I'm currently able to play like 6 hours straight without having to charge! Maybe longer-- I'll have to keep testing and see.

(I actually replaced my 3DS battery a couple months ago but it keeps blinking low-battery red after like 4 hours, and idk if it's actually low or if the gage is just borked because of the new battery-- apparently it's a common issue. Anyway...)

If you're interested, I've put some of the more interesting Pokemon romhacks I've found so far in my Link Library here. I'm really interested in ones that use the Pokemon games as a base and create totally new storylines or settings-- if you know of any good ones that I haven't added to my list yet, let me know!

1. Removing my data from various Meta sites-- most of them were there for business purposes, but I want to put my business energies elsewhere AND I don't want Meta to have my stuff floating around to use in their horrible AI nonsense. I'm downloading copies of my data and then deleting the posts (which they make you do one by one). I plan to put up a "where to find me" post for people who may come looking, and I'll keep the usernames for business purposes, but I'm going to focus on my (business) blog (and later newsletter/shop) and that's it.

2. Settling into using Obsidian for my personal data stuff. I think I've got a system set up that I like, and now I just need to add in things. For instance, I'm adding my books read for 2025 into the system and I've set up fun views like this:

Which is built from a Base which is a table built from metadata in individual entries. So I'm adding books one by one, making sure the imported data is actually correct, and then copying over my notes/reviews. It's a little slow-going but it's fun to see everything in one place. And I've decided I don't care about counting how many pages I read in a year or even how many books I read in a month, just a general yearly total of books read is fine, so that'll make things easier going forward.

3. Listening to music from DEMO FEST 2025! Some recommendations: Error 804's ANGUISH, Morora's Kosovo, The Carringtons' Wild.

4. Downloading interesting pattern images from the Smithsonian digital collections to use for icons and (if I can figure out how) website backgrounds.

Hello, happy Friday! (Had to double-check that, I thought it was Saturday.) Here's some links for you!

Community

• Found two websites that map out fruit trees/free wild food you can presumably get if you're in the right area: Endless Orchard and Falling Fruit
• Meshtastic is a thing that lets you use LoRa radios as long-range off-grid communication platform

Music

• Intertapes is a collection of found cassette tapes and the recordings on them!

Books

Recently (okay not that recent) added to Project Gutenberg and that I found interesting in some way:

• A lady's cruise in a French man-of-war by C. F. (Constance Frederica) Gordon Cumming
• Among the Isles of Shoals by Celia Thaxter
• Romantic castles and palaces: as seen and described by famous writers
• How to speak with the dead by Sciens
• Narrative of the operations and recent discoveries within the pyramids, temples, tombs and excavations in Egypt and Nubia; vol. 1: and of a journey to the coast of the Red Sea, in search of the ancient Berenice; and another to the Oasis of Jupiter Ammon (what a title!)

Also the Johnny.Decimal workbook has been released into the Creative Commons.

AI Sucks

• Anthropic Exec Forces AI Chatbot on Gay Discord Community, Members Flee (need free account to read or else try here). It doesn't surprise me than an AI exec would force others to use their shitty bot, what DOES surprise me is that he's basically in AI psychosis. Shouldn't an exec know better? (And yet it seems to be common.)
• AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism from Are.na. An interesting visual log.

and: On Incomputable Language: An Essay on AI from Eruditorum Press. I liked this quote:

There is a tedious point that advocates of AI art will periodically articulate to the effect of AI rendering art accessible to more people—ones lacking in time or ability to otherwise produce it. The response to this is generally that the time and labor involved is fundamental to art. But even more fundamental is the thought involved. At the end of the day what defines art is the existence of intention behind it—the fact that some consciousness experienced thoughts that it subsequently tried to communicate. Without that there’s simply lines on paper, splotches of color, and noise. At the risk of tautology, meaning exists because people mean things. Nobody else is going to do that work for us. If we don’t do it, really, what’s the fucking point?

More?

New Link Library is here and there's even an RSS feed you can use to track updates!